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THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



The Foes of 
Our Own Household 



By 

Theodore Roosevelt 

AUTHOR OF "fear GOD AND TAKE YOUR 
OWN PART," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPAN'V 



1^ 






K 



COPYRIGHT, 19 1 7, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 19 1 7, 
BY THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 191 7, 
BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

OCT -8 1917 

©G1.A476442 



TO 

OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS 

THEIR MOTHER AND I 

DEDICATE THIS BOOK 



Sagamore Hill, 
September ist, igiy. 



In an age of fops and toys, 

Wanting wisdom, void of right, 

Who shall nerve heroic boys 

To hazard all in Freedom's fight, — 

Break sharply off their jolly games. 

Forsake their comrades gay. 

And quit proud homes and youthful dames 

For famine, toil and fray? 

Yet on the nimble air benign 

Speed nimbler messages. 

That waft the breath of grace divine 

To hearts in sloth and ease. 

So nigh is grandeur to our dust. 

So near is God to man, 

When Duty whispers low. Thou must. 

The youth replies, / can. 

— Emerson. 



vu 



FOREWORD 

The man who still asks "why we are at war/' 
or apologizes in any way for Germany, should 
look to his own soul; he is neither a patriot nor 
a true American, nor a lover of mankind; and 
the foes of his own household are the folly and 
the cowardice and the cold selfishness of his own 
heart. 

We should hold Germany in horror for what 
she has done. But we should regard with con- 
tempt and loathing the Americans who directly 
or indirectly give her aid and comfort; whether 
they do so by downright attack on our own 
country, by upholding Germany, by assailing 
any of our allies, by trying to discourage our 
people from vigorous, resolute, unyielding prose- 
cution of the war, or by crying on behalf of 
peace, peace, when there ought not to be peace. 

In the long run we have less to fear from 
foes without than from foes within; for the 
former will be formidable only as the latter 
break our strength. The men who oppose pre- 
paredness in our military and our industrial life ; 
the business or political corruptionist or reac- 
tionary and the reckless demagogue who is his 
nominal opponent; the man of wealth and greed 

ix 



FOREWORD 

who cares for nothing but profits, and the 
sinister creature who plays upon and inflames 
the passions of envy and violence; the hard 
materialist, the self-indulgent lover of ease and 
pleasure, and the silly sentimentalist — all these are 
the permanent foes of our own household. From 
their ranks are drawn our immediate foes; the 
faint-hearted who fear Germany, the puzzle- 
headed who refuse to understand her, and the 
men of foul soul who do her evil bidding. The 
Hun within our gates masquerades in many dis- 
/ guises; he is our dangerous enemy; and he 
V . should be hunted down without mercy. High- 
minded men and women should brace their souls 
against the Menace of Peace without Victory 
for the Right. It is worse than idle to talk of a 
League to Enforce Peace for the Future, unless 
we, who are now partners in the League to 
Smite Down Wrong in the Present with iron 
will carry the war through to overwhelming 
triumph. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Foreword. ....... ix 

CHAPTER 

I. The Instant Need; And the Ultimate 

Need . . . . . . .15 

II. Must We Be Brayed in a Mortar Before 

Our Folly Depart from Us? . . 31 

III. The Children of the Crucible . . 58 

IV. Washington and Lincoln ... 86 

V. A Square Deal in Law Enforcement . 108 

VI. Industrial Justice ; the Tool-Owner and 

the Tool-User 121 

VII. Social Justice; the Brotherly Court of 

Philadelphia 143 

VIII. Socialism versus Social Reform . . 161 

IX. The Farmer; the Corner-Stone of Civ- 
ilization 188 

X. The Word of Micah; the Religion of 

Service 218 

XL The Parasite Woman; the Only Indis- 
pensable Citizen . . . .231 

XII. Birth Reform ; from the Positive, Not 

the Negative Side . . . . 250 

xi 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Appendix A. Why We Are at War ; the Ger- 
man Horror . . . . * . 273 
Appendix B. Fair Play for All Americans . 277 
Appendix C. Murder Is Not Debatable . . 280 
Appendix D. The "Conscientious Objector" . 287 
Appendix E. The Hun Within Our Gates . 293 

Appendix F. Nine-tenths of Wisdom Is Being 

Wise in Time ..... 296 

Appendix G. Correspondence with the Presi- 
dent AND THE Secretary of War . . 304 



xu 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 



THE FOES OF OUR 
OWN HOUSEHOLD 

CHAPTER I 

THE INSTANT NEED; AND THE ULTIMATE NEED 

'Tp HE world is at this moment passing through 
one of those terrible periods of convulsion 
when the souls of men and of nations are tried as 
by fire. Woe to the man or to the nation that at 
such a time stands as once Laodicea stood; as 
the people of ancient Meroz stood, when they 
dared not come to the help of the Lord against 
the mighty ! In such a crisis the moral weakling 
is the enemy of the right; and the pacifist is as 
surely a traitor to his country and to humanity 
as is the most brutal wrong-doer. 

At the outbreak of the war our people were 
stunned, blinded, terrified by the extent of the 
world disaster. Those among our leaders who 
were greedy, those who were selfish and ease- 
loving, those who were timid, and those who 
were merely short-sighted, all joined to blindfold 

15 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

the eyes and dull the conscience of the people 
so that it might neither see iniquity nor gird its 
loins for the inevitable struggle. The moral 
sense of our people was drugged into stupor by 
the men in high places who taught us that we 
had no concern with the causes of this war, 
that all the combatants were fighting for the 
same things, that it was our duty to be neutral 
between right and wrong, that we should look 
with tepid indifference on the murder of our un- 
armed men, women and children, that we ought 
to be too proud to fight for our just rights, that 
our proper aim should be to secure peace without 
\ victory for the right. But at last we stand with 
our faces to the light. At last we have faced 
our duty. Now it behooves us to do this duty 
with miasterful efficiency. 

We are in the war. But we are not yet 
awake. We are passing through, in exag- 
gerated form, the phase through which England 
passed during the first year of the war. A very 
large number of Englishmen fooled themselves 
with the idea that they lived on an island and 
were safe anyhow, that the war would soon be 
over, and that if they went on with their busi- 
ness as usual, and waved flags and applauded 
patriotic speeches, somebody else would do the 
fighting for them. England has seen the error 
of her ways; she has paid in blood and agony 

i6 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

for her short-sightedness; she is now doing her 
duty with stern resolution. We are repeating 
her early errors on a larger scale ; and assuredly 
we shall pay heavily if we do not in time wake 
from our short-sighted apathy and foolish, self- 
sufficient optimism. 

We live on a continent; we have trusted to 
that fact for safety in the past; we do not un- 
derstand that world conditions have changed 
and that the oceans and even the air have be- 
come highways for military aggression. The 
exploits of the German U-boat off Nantucket 
last summer — exploits which nothing but feeble- 
ness, considerations of political expediency and 
downright lack of courage on our part per- 
mitted — showed that if Germany, or any other 
possible opponent of ours, were free to deal with 
us the security that an ocean barrier once 
offered was annihilated. In other words, the 
battle front of Europe is slowly spreading over 
the whole world. 

We are fighting this war for others. But 
we are also, and primarily, fighting it for our- 
selves. We wish to safeguard to all civilized 
nations which themselves do justice to others, 
the right to enjoy their independence, and there- 
fore to enjoy whatever governmental system 
they desire. But rightly and properly our first 
concern is for our own country. Our own wel- 
fare is at stake. Our own interests are vitally 

17 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

concerned. We are fighting for the honor of 
America and for our permanent place among the 
self-governing nations of mankind. We are 
fighting for our homes, our freedom, our in- 
dependence, our self-respect and well-being. We 
are fighting for our dearest rights, and to avert 
measureless disaster in the future from the land 
in which our children's children are to dwell 
when we are dead. 

In international relations, the Prussianized 
Germany of to-day stands for ruthless self- 
aggrandizement, and contempt for the rights 
of other nations. She stands for the rule of 
might over right; of power over justice. If 
Germany now conquered France and England, 
we would be the next victim; and if the con- 
quest took place at this moment we would be 
a helpless victim. France and England have 
been fighting the battle of this nation as cer- 
tainly as they have been fighting for themselves. 
Every consideration of honor, of self-respect, 
of self-interest, and self-preservation demand 
that we Americans throw our full force into 
this war immediately, without reservation, with 
entire loyalty to our allies, and with the stern 
and steadfast determination to fight the war 
through to a victorious finish. Moreover, we 
should act at once. We have to atone for three 
years of folly and indecision. 

i8 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

We are a nation of a hundred millions of 
people, richer in wealth and resources than any 
other on the earth. Yet we were so utterly un- 
prepared that although Germany declared war 
on us seven months ago we are still merely 
getting ready our strength, we still owe our 
safety exclusively to the fleets and armies of 
our hard-pressed and war-worn allies, to whose 
help we nominally came. 

It is this utter unpreparedness which should 
convey the real lesson to us of this war. And 
remember that as yet we, as a people, acting 
through our governmental authorities, have not 
taken one step to avert disaster in the future 
by introducing a permanent policy of prepared- 
ness. By actual test the system, or rather no- 
system, upon which during the last three years 
we have been told we could rely has proved 
entirely worthless. The measures under which 
we are now acting are temporary makeshifts, 
announced to be such. We have been caught 
utterly unprepared in a terrible emergency be- 
cause we did nothing until the emergency 
actually arose; and now our Government an- 
nounces that what we are doing is purely tem- 
porary; that we shall stop doing it as soon as 
the emergency is over, and will then remain 
equally unprepared for the next emergency. 

It is this blind refusal — from the nation's 

19 



THE FOES OF OtIR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

standpoint I can only call it this criminal re- 
fusal — to provide for the future that forces 
every honest and far-sighted lover of America to 
speak. I would far rather speak words of boast- 
ful flattery; it is not pleasant to tell unpleasant 
truths. Probably it is personally more ad- 
vantageous to utter high-sounding platitudes; 
but platitudes are not what this nation needs at 
this time. I would gladly refrain from pointing 
out our shortcomings of the present and the im- 
mediate past were there any indication that we 
intended to provide for the future. But there is 
no such indication. And yet now is the time 
to formulate our permanent policy; now, when 
the lessons of the war are vivid before our 
eyes, when for the moment the silliness of the 
professional pacifists has less influence than in 
time of peace. Flag-waving, and uttering and 
applauding speeches, and singing patriotic songs, 
are excellent in so far as they are turned into 
cool foresight in preparation and grim resolu- 
tion to spend and be spent when once the day 
of trial has come; but they are merely mis- 
chievous if they are treated as substitutes for 
preparedness in advance and for hard, efficient 
work and readiness for self-sacrifice during the 
crisis itself. 

It is not our alien enemies who are responsible 
for our complete unpreparedness. It is the foes 

20 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

of our own household. The leaders who have 
led us WTong are these foes ; and in so far as our 
own weakness and short-sightedness and love of 
ease and undue regard for material success 
have made us respond readily to such leader- 
ship, we ourselves have been our own foes. 

Preparedness against war cannot be real, 
cannot be thoroughgoing, unless it rests on 
preparedness for the tasks of peace. The I. W. 
W. and similar organizations, including the 
bulk of the "scientific" party socialists, have 
showed themselves the enemies of this country 
in this crisis, and will be its permanent enemies ; 
and exactly the same thing is true of the self- 
satisfied, short-sighted rich men who oppose, 
or are inertly indifferent to, the effort to re- 
move the causes of that preventable misery 
and wrong which drive honest poor men to 
follow the false prophets of evil. The dishonest 
demagogue and the corrupt reactionary are 
equally the foes of social and industrial justice; 
and mere ignorance — simple, sheer inability to 
understand the facts of present-day life — may 
prevent good people from trying to help the 
farmer and the workingman to help themselves, 
until it is too late to give such help save at the 
price of social convulsion. 

The foes of our own household are our worst 
enemies; and we can oppose them, not only by 

i2J 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

exposing and denouncing them, but by con- 
structive work in planning and building for re- 
forms which shall take into account both the 
economic and the moral factors in human ad- 
vance. We of America can win to our great 
destiny only by service; not by rhetoric, and 
above all not by insincere rhetoric, and that 
dreadful mental double-dealing and verbal jug- 
gling which makes promises and repudiates 
them, and says one thing at one time, and the 
directly opposite thing at another time. ■ Our 
service must be the service of deeds, the deeds 
of war and the deeds of peace. 

The deeds of peace are for the future. The 
instant need is for the deeds of war. If we wish 
to preserve our own self-respect we must do 
our own fighting; and not merely pay — or feed 
— others to fight for us. We must not make 
this a mere dollar war, or potato war. The 
dollars and potatoes are needed; but the great 
need is for armed men who are sternly ready 
to face death in a great cause. Pawnbroker 
patriotism is a poor substitute for fighting 
patriotism. 

At present our prime duty is to fight ef- 
fectively and to send constantly increasing 
masses — millions — of fighting men to the front 
at the earliest moment. Then we must care for 
these men ; we must till our farms, make our f ac- 

22 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

tories more efficient, increase our taxes and sub- 
scribe to our loans; and back up the Red Cross 
and similar organizations. Our governmental 
representatives must show both disinterested- 
ness and common sense in dealing with business. 
We need maximum production; and improper 
restriction of profits, and, therefore, improperly 
low prices, will put a stop to maximum produc- 
tion. It is criminal to halt the work of building 
the Navy or fitting out our training camps be- 
cause of refusal to allow a fair profit to the 
business men who alone can do the work 
speedily and effectively; and it is equally mis- 
chievous not to put a stop to the making of 
unearned and improper fortunes out of the war 
by heavy progressive taxation on the excess war 
profits — taxation as heavy as that which Eng- 
land now imposes; and as regards the proper 
profits that are permitted and encouraged, we 
should insist on a reasonably equitable division 
between the capitalists, the managers and the 
wage workers; and when the wage worker gets 
a first-class wage we should insist that in this 
crisis, as a matter of vital patriotic duty, he does 
first-class work for the first-class wage. 

Universal suffrage should be based on uni- 
versal service in peace and war; those who 
refuse to render the one have no title to the 
enjoyment of the other. We stand for the 

23 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

democracy of service; we are against privilege, 
and therefore against the privilege which would 
escape service in war. If a man's conscience 
forbids him to fight, put him to dangerous work, 
such as mine-sweeping or digging trenches, 
where, although his own life is in peril, he does 
not attempt to kill anyone else; and if his con- 
science forbids him to do this kind of work then 
let it be understood that our consciences forbid 
us to let him vote in a country whose destiny 
must ultimately be decided by men who are 
willing to fight. No human being is entitled to 
any ''right," any privilege, that is not correlated 
with the obligation to perform duty. 

We must continue this war with steadfast en- 
durance until we win the peace of overwhelming 
victory for righteousness; and even while thus 
fighting we must prepare the way for the peace 
of industrial justice, and the justice of in- 
dustrial democracy, which are to come after, 
and to make perfect, the war. These are the 
two needs; the instant need and the ultimate 
need; and both must be met. At the moment 
our chief foes are outside of our border; but 
they are now a danger to us only because of the 
folly and short-sightedness and wrong-doing of 
those who, wittingly or unwittingly, are our 
permanent foes — the foes of our own household. 
The passions and follies of each of us indi- 

24 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

vidually are such foes. And the men in whose 
souls these passions and follies gain the upper 
hand are the permanent foes of this great re- 
public. 

In the present crisis the most evil of these 
foes of our own household are the men who wish 
us to accept peace without victory. In the old 
days on the Western plains we had a proverb, 
"Never draw unless you mean to shoot.'' The 
braggart, the man who uses words which he 
does not translate into deeds, is a source of fear- 
ful wrong and suffering in any serious crisis. 
Having gone into this war, we earn dishonor 
unless we exert our utmost strength and fight 
the war through, at all costs, to a successful 
finish; unless we fight until we win the peace of 
victory. When we went to war there was 
neither talk nor thought of "making the world 
safe for democracy" — if war for that purpose 
was necessary then it had been necessary for 
the preceding two years and a half. We went 
to war because for two years the Germans had 
been murdering our unarmed men, women and 
children, and had definitely announced their in- 
tention to continue the practice. After we had 
been at war a few weeks the President an- 
nounced that our purpose was to make the world 
safe for democracy. This phrase, uttered by the 
President when we were already at war, 

25 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

solemnly pledged us to exert our whole strength, 
and suffer any losses, in a terrible crusade, not 
for our own benefit, but for the benefit of man- 
kind as a whole. To make such a pledge lightly, 
or to abandon it when once made, would be in- 
famous. Therefore we must keep it. And, 
therefore, we must understand what it means. 
There is a certain rhetorical lack of precision 
about Mr. Wilson's phrase. It cannot mean 
that we are to force our allies, Belgium, Servia, 
Montenegro, England, all of them monarchies, 
to abandon the forms of government which they 
find suitable, and for which they have battled 
with devoted courage. Neither can it mean that 
we are to let peoples which show themselves in- 
capable of self-government continue permanently 
as centres of infection in an otherwise reason- 
ably healthy world-polity. Mr. Wilson's action 
in regard to the two republics of Hayti and San 
Domingo shows that if in any weak country he 
regards democracy as unsafe for others, as a 
nuisance to its neighbors, he will without hesita- 
tion suppress it. Interpreting his phrase, there- 
fore, by the course of conduct he was at the 
same time following, we must regard it as a 
solemn pledge that we will not accept peace 
without complete victory over Germany and her 
allies, Austria and Turkey; inasmuch as Ger- 

26 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

many's mere existence under her present gov- 
ernment makes the world unsafe for democracy, 
and inasmuch as the continued existence of 
Austria and Turkey in their present form neces- 
sarily means the crushing out of democracy and 
liberty in the nations subject to them. We do 
not intend that the German, Magyar and Turk 
shall be oppressed. We do mean that they shall 
be forbidden to oppress others. First and fore- 
most we are to make the world safe for our- 
selves. This is our primary interest. This is 
our war, America's war. If we do not win it, 
we shall some day have to reckon with Germany 
single handed. Therefore, for our own sakes let 
us strike down Germany — and we cannot at this 
time make any distinction between the German 
people and the German rulers, for the German 
people stand solidly behind their rulers, and 
until they separate from their rulers they earn 
our enmity. Belgium must be restored and in- 
demnified. France should receive back Alsace 
and Lorraine. England and Japan should keep 
the colonies they have conquered. Austria and 
Turkey should be broken up. Poland should be 
made independent, with Galicia and Posen in- 
cluded, and reaching to the Baltic. The Czechs 
and their Moravian and Slovak kinsmen should 
be made into a Greater Bohemia. The Jugo- 
slavs should be united in one state. Greater 

27 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

Roumania should take in Roumanian Hungary, 
and Italy Italian Austria. The Turks should be 
ousted from Europe ; Constantinople can be made 
a free commonwealth of the Straits, or given to 
democratic Russia as events may determine. 
Arabia should be an independent Moslem state; 
probably Armenia should be independent; pro- 
vision for the full protection of the Syrians — 
Christians, Druses, and Mohammedans — should 
be made. Northern Schleswig should go back to 
the Danes ; and the victorious allies should them- 
selves grant full autonomy to Lithuania and 
Finland; and, to Ireland, Home Rule within the 
Empire. 

But I do not ask our fellow countrymen who 
fight this war to think merely of others. The 
future of America is at stake, and it is this for 
which our concern is deepest. We must for our 
own sakes now make our whole potential war 
strength as speedily effective as possible. And, 
if we have the smallest power to learn by ex- 
perience, let us face the damage done by our 
lamentable failure to prepare in the past, so that 
we may learn the need of preparing for the 
future. 

During the last seven months we have to our 
credit some things which give us just cause for 
pride. But the net achievement, when compared 
with what every other great nation in the war 

28 



INSTANT NEED; AND ULTIMATE NEED 

achieved during a similar period, is a cause for 
profound humility. 

We have not yet so much as fired one rifle 
against the German armies. We have not a 
man in the trenches. We are now doing, so far 
as preparation is concerned, only those things 
which it was inexcusable for us not to begin 
doing in September, 1914. Yet the time we 
have thus occupied, seven months, is just the 
length of time Germany took in 1870-71, for 
the conquest of France. It is four times as long 
as it took for the conquest of Austria. And we 
are not yet ready to meet a single thoroughly 
equipped hostile army corps of any great mili- 
tary nation ! We owe our safety from conquest 
only to the fact that, to serve their own pur- 
poses, England and France have protected us 
and fought our battles for us. Nor have our 
governmental authorities given the slightest in- 
dication of any intention to provide permanently 
against the continuance of the fatuous policy 
which has produced these results; and yet to 
continue this fatuous policy will ultimately mean 
ruin to the nation. 

The men who boast over what has been ac- 
complished by us in this war during the last 
seven months — during which we have actually 
accomplished nothing, although along many 
lines we have begun to prepare to begin — will 

29 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

do well to remember the comments by Olaf's 
priest Thangbrand on the boasting of the Ice- 
landers : 

Quoth Priest Thangbrand : "What's the use 
Of all this bragging up and down, 
When three women and one goose 
Make a market in your town?" 
Three women and one goose do not make a 
market. Nor do they win a war. And in 
neither case does boasting permanently supply 
the deficiency. 



30 



CHAPTER II 

MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR BEFORE OUR 
FOLLY DEPART FROM US? 

TT is useless to cry over spilt milk. But it is 
much worse than useless, it is mischievous, 
and may be ruinous, to pretend that the milk 
was not spilt, and therefore to invite a repeti- 
tion of the conditions which caused the spilling. 
For the last three years our foremost duty, to 
ourselves and to the world, has been to prepare. 
This duty we have shamefully neglected, and 
our neglect is responsible for the dragging on 
of the war, and for the needless sacrifice of 
myriads of lives. Yet those highest in authority 
seem to read this lesson backwards, as medieval 
sorcerers read the Lord's Prayer. 

The Secretaries of War and the Navy, of 
course, speak for President Wilson. They are 
his instruments in formulating and carrying out 
the entire military policy, temporary and per- 
manent, of the Government. In the Official 
Bulletin of June 7th, the Secretary of War, Mr. 
Baker, is reported as saying that there is "dif- 
ficulty . . . disorder and confusion ... in 

31 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

getting things started," and as adding: "But 
it is a happy confusion. I deHght in the fact 
that when we entered this war we were not, 
Hke our adversary, ready for it, anxious for it, 
prepared for it and inviting it. Accustomed to 
peace, we were not ready." The Secretary of 
the Navy, Mr. Daniels, is quoted in the pubHc 
press (of course less authentic authority than 
the Official Bulletin) as answering a query as 
to whether the Navy was preparing new 
weapons, by saying: "That cannot be deter- 
mined until we know whether we are going to 
fight an offensive or a defensive war." 

The importance of these statements is that 
they lay down the rule of conduct which we as 
a people are now officially supposed to accept for 
our future policy; therefore it is proposed that 
we continue the policy of unpreparedness which 
we have followed in such striking fashion in 
the last three years. We are so to act, on the 
ground that although our unpreparedness pro- 
duced "difficulty, disorder and confusion," yet 
that it was a "happy confusion," and that our 
failure to prepare ought to give us "delight"; 
and that before we make ready the engines 
which alone can make our navy thoroughly 
effective and formidable in war, we must wait 
until some months after the war comes and then 
try to reach a cautious, provisional conclusion 

32 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

as to whether it is to be offensive or defensive! 
Apparently, it is proposed to continue our 
policy of unpreparedness in the future because 
it has not brought us to destruction in the past. 
The explanation of the latter fact is simple. 
For the last four years the international situa- 
tion has been such that we could, and did, com- 
mit every species of blunder and yet escape 
punishment. Our task in foreign affairs was 
very easy; it was very badly performed; but 
the conditions were such that no formidable 
nation in the world dared take its eyes off the 
other formidable nations; and so, in spite of the 
really marvelous indecision and feebleness of 
our governmental policy, we were able to follow 
a devious, and often a retrograde, course 
through and among our difficulties with little loss 
of money — and seemingly loss of honor did not 
concern us, for we had grown to accept streams 
of adroit and irrelevant rhetoric as a worthy 
substitute for honorable action. 

In Mexico the various insurgent leaders whom 
we alternately petted and opposed systematically 
slaughtered our own men, women and children, 
and those of the Spaniards, and Chinese, whom 
they despised as heartily as they did us; but 
they played no such antics with the nations they 
feared and respected, such as the Germans. 
English, French and Japanese ; accordingly none 

33 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

of the latter found it necessary to interfere at 
the moment; and therefore the mass of our 
people, who were not in Mexico, and who were 
taught by the Government to look with lethargic, 
indifference on the slaughter of their fellow 
citizens in Mexico, were able to eat the bread of 
humiliation in physical safety. How any people 
with an honorable past could submit to such 
shame as our Government inflicted on our peo- 
ple in connection with the Carrizal incident is 
literally inexplicable. 

Then the great war occurred. It at once be- 
came a matter of incalculable consequence to 
each of the contending nations not to irritate 
us; and our safety for the time being seemed 
assured. Germany, however, gradually ac- 
quired such overweening contempt for our 
career of greedy and peaceable infamy, she so 
despised the merely conversational reply of our 
Government to her outrages, she regarded with 
such utter derision our tame submission to 
murder at the same time that we prattled of 
peace and duty, and our failure to prepare so 
thoroughly convinced her that our scabbard 
held nothing save either a pen or a wooden 
sword, that she literally kicked us into war — a 
war which our own lack of self-respect had 
rendered inevitable and for which we had not 
prepared in the smallest degree. 

34 ^. r 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

On January 31st last Germany sent us a note 
which, after a couple of months' hesitation and 
uncertainty, was accepted by the President and 
Congress as a declaration of war — for we did 
not go to war in April, but merely stated that 
Germany was already at war with us. We sun- 
dered diplomatic relations with Germany a couple 
of days after the arrival of the note. For two 
months we announced that we were waiting for 
an "overt act'' of murder. 

Our Government defined this term with 
meticulous precision. It decided, for example, 
that the murder of the two little American-born 
O'Donnell girls was not, so far as we were con- 
cerned, a murder, because their father had not 
been naturalized — apparently we did not regard 
the slaughter of the children of a non-naturalized 
parent as "making democracy unsafe." Some 
thirty American non-combatants were killed be- 
fore a case occurred in which the Germans con- 
sented to commit murder in such fashion as to 
violate all, instead of merely some, of the rules, 
our Government had laid down as guides for 
the justifiable homicide of peaceful Americans 
going about their lawful business on the high 
seas. 

We sluggishly drifted sternforemost into war. 
The reasons alleged were acts precisely like the 
acts which had been committed throughout the 

35 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

previous two years; there was more justifica- 
tion for going to war two years previously when 
the Lusitania was sunk than at that particular 
moment. After an interval of meditation we 
announced through our Government that we had 
discovered that it was our duty to wage the war 
because it was a fight for the perpetuation of de- 
mocracy and for the rights of small nations and 
of humanity generally — all of which we had been 
strenuously denying, directly and indirectly, for 
the preceding two years and a half. 

Then our people began to wake up to the 
actual situation. They had been taught to be- 
lieve that easy — and slippery — rhetoric was a 
cheap substitute for action, and they now found 
it so cheap as to be worthless. They had been 
taught to trust for safety to boasts about our 
peaceful power and virtuous intentions, and to 
clamorous demands that everybody should love 
us because we were so harmless, and to quaver- 
ing assertions that the way to avoid war was 
not to prepare for it. When the test came they 
found that all these devices in the aggregate 
amounted to absolutely nothing when once we 
were face to face with the "merciless old 
verities." We began, rather dimly, to realize 
that, as a national asset, a combination of glib 
sophistry with the feeble sham-amiability which 
obviously springs from fear, was of small value 

36 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

when we were faced by stern and brutal men 
with guns in their hands. 

Let our people keep steadily in remembrance 
that the pacifists, sometimes speaking their own 
folly, and sometimes acting under the sinister 
inspiration of the paid German emissaries, in- 
sisted that we should keep unprepared because, 
in the words of Mr. Wilson's Secretary of War, 
to be prepared for war is to be "anxious for 
it . . . and inviting it." They insisted that 
unpreparedness meant peace. The Presidential 
campaign last fall was fought and won on the 
issue that such persistent unpreparedness "kept 
us out of war'' — all of the political leaders on 
one side and a considerable number of those on 
the other side taking this position. Yellow 
called to yellow. 

Well, we all know the outcome. Our un- 
preparedness did not "keep us out" of the war. 
Unpreparedness never does keep a nation out 
of war ; it merely makes a nation incompetent to 
carry it on effectively. And preparedness does 
not "invite" war; on the contrary it usually 
averts war, and always renders the prepared 
nation able to act efficiently if war should, un- 
happily, come. 

Seven months have passed since Germany's 
practical declaration of war against us — (our 
immediate breaking of diplomatic relations and 

37 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

the subsequent action of Congress show that 
our Government really accepted the German 
note of January 31 as in effect a declaration of 
war, although the Administration's inveterate 
habit of shuffling obscured the truth for the first 
sixty days). During these months there has 
been admirable work done by the men, includ- 
ing the big business men, who in a spirit of the 
highest patriotism have given up their whole 
time to governmental work, food conservation 
and control. Red Cross activities, public work 
of all kinds at Washington and elsewhere. The 
preparatory work for a really extensive pro- 
gram of aircraft construction has been both 
speedy and efficient. Congress, with fine patriot- 
ism, appropriated vast sums of money for the use 
of the Administration. Admiral Sims and our 
anti-submarine craft are doing effective work 
in support of the similar British craft; General 
Wood, General Bell, General Crowder, Gen- 
eral Squier, Admiral Cleaves, and many other 
army and navy officers have in their several 
fields accomplished very much — the utmost 
possible with the means at hand; that gallant 
and efficient officer. General Pershing, and 
his fine divisions of infantry are certain to give 
us all cause for pride and exultation when they 
are put on the firing line. Some hundreds of 
thousands of other gallant men have volun- 

38 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

teered, under very discouraging circumstances, 
and some millions stand ready to be drafted. 

But let us look facts squarely in the face. If 
Germany were free to use even a tenth of her 
strength against us all the troops that we have 
at this moment assembled, at home and abroad, 
would not hold her a week. During the last seven 
m.onths the bad effects of our complete failure 
to prepare during the preceding three years 
have been appallingly evident. The "difficulty, 
disorder and confusion,'' as Secretary Baker 
puts it, have been such as in sum to have 
amounted to absolute inability to produce within 
these seven months any force that could match 
even a single German army corps. If we had 
been pitted single-handed against any one old- 
world military power of the first rank, whether 
European or Asiatic, we should have been con- 
quered as completely as Belgium or Roumania, 
within these seven months — indeed, within the 
first three months. We owe our ignoble safety, 
we owe the fact that we are not at this moment 
cowering under the heel of an alien conqueror, 
solely to the protection given us by the British 
fleet and the French and British armies during 
these months. Except for the safety thus se- 
cured us, Pershing and his men, and Sims and 
his men, and some tens of thousands like them, 
would have bravely died in hopeless battle; and 

39 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

our remaining millions of men would never even 
have had a chance to fight for their wives and 
children. 

No American worth his salt can look these 
facts in the face without shame and alarm. 
Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we 
have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really 
to be a great nation, we must not merely talk 
big; we must act big. And our actions have 
been very, very small! 

Had we prepared in advance we could have 
put a couple of million troops in the field last 
April; and the war would have been over now. 
As it is, we have so far done nothing. 

We cannot permanently hold a leading place 
in the world unless we prepare. But there is 
far more than world-position at stake. Our mere 
safety at home is at stake. We cannot prevent 
ourselves from sooner or later sinking into pre- 
cisely the position China now occupies in the 
presence of Japan, unless we prepare. The 
probabilities are overwhelming that the next 
time we fight a formidable foe we shall not 
again find allies whose interest it will be to pro- 
tect us, and to shield us from the consequences 
of our feebleness and short-sightedness, as 
France and England have for seven months — in- 
deed for three years — been doing. This means 
that ruin will surely in the end befall us unless 

40 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

we ourselves so prepare our strength that 
against a formidable opponent we shall be able 
to do for ourselves what the English and French 
armies and navies are now doing for us. 

Let us make no mistake. Unless we beat 
Germany in Europe, we shall have to fight her 
deadly ambition on our own coasts and in our 
own continent. A great American army in 
Europe now is the best possible insurance 
against a great European or Asiatic army in 
our own country a couple of years, or a couple 
of decades hence. 

We are fighting for humanity; but we are 
also, and primarily, fighting for our own vital 
interests. Our army in France will fight for 
France and Belgium; but most of all it will be 
fighting for America. Until we make the world 
safe for America (and incidentally until we 
make democracy safe in America), it is empty 
rhetoric to talk of making the world safe for 
democracy; and no one of these objects can be 
obtained merely by high-sounding words, or by 
anything else save by the exercise of hard, grim, 
common sense in advance preparation, and then 
by unflinching courage in the use of the 
hardened strength which has thus been pre- 
pared. 

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. 
In this crisis we have been saved by the valor 

41 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

of others from paying a ruinous price for our 
folly. Let us now put ourselves in such shape 
that next time we shall be able to save ourselves, 
instead of helplessly asking some one who is 
stronger and braver to do the job for us. The 
first step toward the achievement of this end is 
clearly to understand the present situation. 
Seven months after Germany virtually declared 
war on us, five months after we reluctantly ad- 
mitted that we were at war, we have a few tens 
of thousands of gallant infantry near the front, 
forming an almost inappreciable proportion of 
the large armies engaged; we have some hun- 
dreds of thousands of men who have just begun, 
or expect soon to begin, training. We have re- 
fused to standardize our ammunition by the am- 
munition of our allies. We are beginning to 
manufacture good artillery, and to get our sub- 
marines and anti-submarines in shape — although 
we have signally failed to meet the submarine 
menace affirmatively by the development of an 
anti-submarine force sufficient to quell it; we 
have shaped an excellent plan for aircraft de- 
velopment; but as yet we have not a single big 
field gun or a single war aeroplane fit to match 
against the field artillery and flying machines 
of either our allies or our enemies. We are 
short of rifles, of tents, of clothing, of every- 
thing. We are actually building rifles of a 

42 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

new type which nevertheless will not take the 
standardized ammunition of either of our allies. 
And in the Official Journal of the Adminis- 
tration we are officially told on behalf of the 
Administration that this is a "happy confusion'' 
and that we should feel "delight" because of our 
shameful unpreparedness. 

Once again, let us remember Germany's record 
of ruthless efficiency in her former wars — in 
each of which her stoutest allies were the 
pacifists, the foolish braggart optimists, and all 
the anti-preparedness host, in the households of 
her foes. 

Seven months have elapsed since Germany's 
practical declaration of war against us; and 
less than seven months were required by Ger- 
many in 1870-71 to conquer France. She 
needed only as many weeks to conquer Austria. 
Japan's efficiency against Russia was as marked. 
I do not describe these conditions in order to 
reproach those responsible for them. I would 
gladly pass them by in silence, and devote my 
self exclusively, as I have been doing for the 
last seven months, to backing up every belated 
measure for war-efficiency which by any stretch 
of my conscience I found myself able to cham- 
pion. But when Mr. Wilson's Administration 
jauntily expresses "delight" in conditions which 
are a source of bitter humiliation to every 

43 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

patriotic and reasonably clear-sighted American, 
when the Administration thus impliedly advo- 
cates making our past record the standard for 
our future conduct, it becomes a matter of im- 
perative obligation upon an honest man to speak 
out. The task of our Government during the 
last four years in foreign affairs has not been 
difficult. It has been exceptionally easy and yet 
it has been wretchedly performed. Our task in 
this war is not difficult. On the contrary it is 
exceptionally easy, so easy that we must clearly 
understand that never again will the conditions 
be so favorable to wage serious war, and escape 
the consequences of our blunders and our folly; 
for never again can we expect other nations to 
protect us with their armies and fleets while our 
politicians slowly make ready. 

I believe that with our wealth, our population, 
our immense energy, and extraordinary re- 
sources, we will within a year or so after our 
entry into the war develop such usable strength 
as to make us a ponderable element in aid of our 
allies. I believe that by that time we shall be 
able to defend ourselves with reasonable efficiency 
if by any mischance the war should come to our 
own continent. But if we ever fight a formid- 
able foe single-handed, we shall not be granted 
a year in which to prepare, even inadequately. 

44 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

One of the most ominous of our shortcom- 
ings has been our failure to prepare cargo ships 
in view of the ever-growing danger from the 
submarine menace. The submarine has de- 
veloped into a more formidable offensive than 
defensive weapon. It has not been able to pre- 
vent the transport of great invading armies 
across the seas, for the toll it takes is too small 
to be serious as against one such expedition. But 
the toll continues, month after month; with the 
result that, as the years continue, it exercises 
tremendous pressure. 

Britain, France and Italy now need fuel and 
food; our armies abroad, as they increase in 
number, will need food, munitions, reenforce- 
ments; the submarines are steadily cutting down 
the available tonnage of the world; and during 
these seven months we have done nothing what- 
ever to provide against this mortal danger, either 
by developing an efficient anti-submarine force 
or a sufficient number of speedy cargo ships. 
When, on January 31st last, the German note 
came, even the blindest of our public ser- 
vants ought at once to have grasped its sig- 
nificance and begun with the utmost energy to 
prepare both for warfare against the sub- 
marine and also for the output of immense 
quantities of ships reasonably able to escape 
from the submarine. 

45 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

We could have commandeered many ships 
that were being built. Any number of things 
could have been done; and nevertheless we are 
only just getting ready to begin! Ships of the 
necessary speed could be built only of steel, and 
only steel ships would be permanently useful; 
yet the Administration dawdled through month 
after month, doing nothing save to acquiesce in 
or abet a squabble started on behalf of wooden 
ship interests, and of service only to Germany. 
General Goethals was admirably fitted to build 
the ships, if he had been backed as he was backed 
when he built the Isthmian canal; but he Vas 
not given the backing, and the conditions were 
made such that he was finally driven from office. 
We are only now beginning to exert our business 
energy along this vitally necessary line; we may 
yet make our position partially good; but our 
seven months' delay has been unpardonable, and 
we cannot offset its evil effects — and how evil 
these effects will be no one can as yet foretell. 
Think what Germany did to her foes in the first 
ninety days, in the first thirty days of this war, 
and you will have an idea of the appalling disas- 
ter that will some day befall us unless we turn 
seriously to the solution of the problem of self- 
defense. 

There is but one such solution. It is the 
adoption of the principle of universal military 

46 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

training of our young men in advance, in time 
of peace, with as a corollary the acceptance of 
the obligation of universal service in time of 
war. This is the only democratic system. This 
is the only efficient system. Acceptance of the 
principle it involves will automatically result in 
eliminating during peace time, instead of wait- 
ing until war comes to eliminate, the kind of ad- 
ministration of the War and Navy departments 
which has resulted in inefficient submarines, air- 
craft that could not be sent across the enemy's 
trenches, and artillery which could not be pitted 
in battle against the guns of military nations. 
When the average citizen has received a year's 
training with the colors on the field he will re- 
coil from our present fatuous acceptances of 
shams. 

It is at present the duty of every good Ameri- 
can to do the best he can with the inadequate 
or imperfect means provided. Let him, if a 
man of fighting age, do his utmost to get into 
the fighting line — Red Cross work, Y. M. C. A. 
work, driving ambulances, and the like, ex- 
cellent though it all is, should be left to men 
not of military age or unfit for military service, 
and to women; young men of vigorous bodies 
and sound hearts should be left free to do their 
proper work in the fighting line. A war is 
primarily won by soldiers; the work of the non- 
47 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

soldiers, however valuable, is merely accessory 
to the primary work of the fighting men. 

Let every man volunteer who can; let him 
volunteer in the army, the navy, the national 
guard; let him eagerly serve in the drafted 
troops if he is drafted. Hundreds of thousands 
of men have responded to the President's various 
calls for volunteers ; volunteers for the army, for 
the navy, for the marine corps, for the national 
guard, for the officers' training camps; and 
there would have been none of the shortage that 
has actually occurred if only the right kind of 
appeal for volunteers had been made and the 
proper methods of using and developing them 
had been adopted. 

The draft has been admirably administered by 
General Crowder and is excellent in so far as it 
recognizes the principle of obligatory service; 
it is inadequate and unjust in so far as it is 
treated only as a temporary device, and in so 
far as it makes such service "selective," that 
is, in so far as it requires the haphazard selec- 
tion of one man to make sacrifices while other 
men, not entitled to exemption, are relieved of 
duty at his expense. It is not too late to remedy 
this. A law should at once be passed making 
military training universal for our young men, 
and providing for its immediate application to all 
the young men between 19 and 21. In the Civil 

48 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

War three-fourths of the Union soldiers entered 
the army when they were 21 or under. 

The officers' training camps have done in- 
valuable service. They were started by a small 
group of young men in New York, two years 
and a half ago; these young men persevered in 
spite of the cold, discouraging, and sometimes 
hostile attitude of the Administration; and 
to Major General Leonard Wood the credit 
mainly belongs, for he took hold of the work 
and put it through and thereby did more than 
any other one man for our preparedness in ad- 
vance — and when this war broke out, he was 
actually punished for this and for other things 
he had done in the interest of preparing our 
military strength. Advantage can be taken of 
these camps only by men of a "college educa- 
tion or its equivalent," who have sufficient means 
to enable them to stand the expense. Under 
existing conditions men of less means cannot 
become officers — whereas, if we had only been 
already under a system of universal military 
training the officers would have been chosen in 
democratic fashion from the best among all the 
men, rich or poor, who underwent the training. 

We are in the war. The shortcomings, due 
to failure to prepare, and to ill-advised action, 
must at the moment be treated only as addi- 
tional spur3 to action. We must render service 

49 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

in spite of them. But if we have a shred of 
common sense we will see to it that hereafter 
they are not repeated and that our permanent 
policy is such that we shall be ready for the 
next war, and not have to trust to somebody 
else to save us. 

We honor the regulars of the army and navy. 
We honor the national guardsmen. We honor 
the men of the training camps, and the drafted 
men whom they are to command and train. But 
never forget that all these men are now able to 
fit themselves to render service only because the 
British and French fleets give us time, for if we 
had not such protection we should already have 
been trampled into dust beneath the feet of our 
foes. 

Shame shall be our portion if we rest con- 
tent with such safety. Shame shall bow the 
heads of our sons and daughters if we do not 
prepare in advance so that at any moment we 
can guard our hearthstones with our own har- 
dened strength. 

There is but one effective way in which thus 
to perpare. Base universal suffrage on the 
only safe foundation, universal service. Let 
the man be trained in time of peace to military 
duty; and let no man vote in the country who 
is not willing to fight for the country. To make 
military service in a democracy a matter of in- 

50 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

dividual choice is as unjustifiable as to make 
obedience to law or the payment of taxes an in- 
dividual choice. 

Let the woman be trained in all the ways that 
will fit her for her work in peace or war. Give 
to man and woman equality of right; base the 
privilege thus secured on the service each must 
render; and demand from them, not identity of 
function, but, as a matter of obligation, the full 
performance of whatever duty each can best per- 
form. 

Let every young man, at nineteen or twenty, 
serve a year in the field. Let all officers 
be chosen from the best of those who have thus 
served and who wish the chance to enter the 
officers' school; this will put rich man and poor 
man on the same footing. When once this 
system has begun fairly to function, we shall be 
ready at any time to repel the attack of any 
foreign foe who may make war on us; and at 
the same time by training them in soul, mind 
and body, in giving them habits of self-respect, 
moral and physical cleanliness, respect for the 
rights of others, self-reliance and obedience, we 
shall have immeasurably bettered the young men 
of the nation and have fitted them for the tasks 
of peace. 

Nor should the benefit of such training be 
confined to young men. In this great war, a 

51 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

war between peoples as well as between armies, 
the woman has worked in the hospital, in the 
factory, in the fields, thereby releasing the man 
for work on the battle line. Her training in time 
of peace would render her more fit for such 
duties, and also more fit to do the peace work 
of home nursing, home sanitation and the like. 
We need in our national life a common, demo- 
cratic purpose, expressing itself in a sense of 
heightened social responsibility. Let America 
adopt for her sons and her daughters the prin- 
ciple of universal training, of universal service; 
and let her take the lead among nations by 
making both the training and the service really 
universal, so that the collective strength of the 
nation may be used against our foes of peace as 
well as our foes of war. 

So much for our future policy. At this mo- 
ment our policy should consist in whole- 
heartedly bending our every effort to win an 
overwhelming triumph in the war. We are for 
the time being safe behind the rampart of the 
British fleet, and of the French and British 
armies. It is galling thus to owe our safety to 
others; but let us at least bend all our energies 
to developing our might so that in our turn we 
may be able to guarantee safety to ourselves and 
triumph to our allies. We would not have time 
to develop our strength were it not for the pro- 

52 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

tection the allies give us. But they do give it. 
Therefore we have the opportunity to make use 
of our gigantic resources. We can, within a 
year, if only we choose, develop our strength so 
that we shall be the deciding factor in the war, 
and develop our intelligent purpose so that we 
shall refuse to accept any peace not based on 
the complete overthrow of the Prussianized 
Germany of the Hohenzollerns. If we do 
this we shall restore our self-respect, we shall 
incalculably benefit our children, we shall win 
a commanding position, and we shall be able 
to render untold service to ourselves and to 
our allies. If we do not do this, if we fail to 
develop and exert our strength to the utmost, if 
we partly adopt the attitude of the onlooker, if 
we let others do the hard, rough, dangerous 
fighting work, then we shall have betrayed a 
sacred trust, from the standpoint of America, of 
heroic and bleeding France, of gallant and suf- 
fering Belgium, and of the world at large. In 
such case we must, when peace comes, stand 
humbly in the presence of the nations who have 
really fought. In such case, the world will 
have been saved, but it will have been saved by 
England, and not by us. In such case all that 
we can do will be to thank England for having 
saved the world — and the peace will be Eng- 
land's peace. Only those who do the job will 

53 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

have a right to the reward in honor and in 
power. Only if we play a leading part in 
bringing the war to a close can we expect to 
make the peace in reality our peace. I honor Eng- 
land for all that she is doing; but I wish us to 
do as well, for otherwise we shall have no right 
to be more than a looker-on at England's peace, 
at the allies' peace — unless, indeed, in the un- 
believable event that our Government should 
make us traitorous to our duty, and secure a 
base peace which would really be Germany's 
peace, a peace without victory, a peace welcomed 
by all the Huns within our gates, by all the 
pacifists and pro-Germans, by all the shirkers 
and slackers and soft fools ; a peace which would 
make high-spirited Americans bow their heads 
with shame. Only if we do our full duty can we 
make it a joint peace of ourselves and our allies, 
a peace in which we rightfully have our full say, 
on an equality with England, France, Russia, 
Italy. If we aren't going to do the job, then I 
shall be glad to see it done by England and the 
rest of the allies. But I am a good American 
and therefore I wish to see us do the job our- 
selves. Rhetoric and boasting won't give us our 
place in the world. This is the hour of the fight- 
ing men and of the other men and the women 
who stand back of the fighting men, and enable 
them to fight. 

54 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

To my fellow Americans I preach the sword 
of the Lord and of Gideon. In this great war for 
righteousness, we Americans have a tremendous 
task ahead of us. I believe the American peo- 
ple are entirely willing to make any sacrifice, 
and to render any service, and I believe that 
they should be explicitly shown how great the 
service is they are called upon to render, how 
great the need is that they should unflinchingly 
face any sacrifice that is made. I ask of you, 
and I ask of those who govern you — who govern 
this great mass of people — that we may be given 
direct practical lines of effort. With all my 
heart I believe that our people have in them 
the same patriotism, the same nobility of soul 
to which Washington and Lincoln were able to 
appeal. I ask that the appeal be made, the ap- 
peal for effort, and with it the guarantee by 
actual governmental performance that the effort 
shall not be wasted. 

It is through the Government that we must 
do the chief work, of course; but let us also 
ourselves do individually each his or her own 
part. Let us help the Red Cross; let us cheer- 
fully accept the draft, and gladly volunteer, if 
we meet the requirements, and if we are allowed 
to volunteer. Then in addition let each of us 
make up his mind willingly and cheerfully to 
accept any personal hardships that may come, 

55 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

in high taxes, in repeated loans and reduced in- 
come. Let us fare more simply, and cut out 
alcohol; let us show our eager and resolute pur- 
pose to key up the industrial and social life of 
the country to the highest scale of efficiency and 
accomplishment. We must raise food in abun- 
dance. We must speed up our industries. We 
shall need an enormous provision of supplies; 
we shall need much concentration and control 
of the means of production. 

If we are to hold our proper place as a great 
nation, there must be prodigious exertions on 
the part of this republic. We are in this war, 
and we must not make it a half war. The only 
proper rule is never to fight at all if you can 
honorably avoid it, but never under any cir- 
cumstances to fight in a half-hearted way. 
When peace comes it must be the peace of com- 
plete victory. In winning this victory we must 
have played a full part — the part of deeds — the 
deeds of fighting men. We should instantly 
strain every nerve to make ready millions of 
men, and an abundance of all the huge and 
delicate and formidable and infinitely varied in- 
struments of modern warfare. 

We can't achieve our ends by talk — they must 
be achieved by effort. We can't achieve them 
unless we act together loyally, and with all our 
hearts; as Americans and nothing else. We are 

56 



MUST WE BE BRAYED IN A MORTAR? 

fighting for humanity, for the right of each well- 
behaved nation to independence and to whatever 
form of government it desires ; and we are fight- 
ing for our own hearthstones and for the honor 
and the welfare of our children and our chil- 
dren's children. We are fighting against a very 
efficient and powerful, and an utterly brutal and 
unscrupulous enemy. Let us give every man in 
this country his rights without regard to creed 
or birthplace, or national origin, or color. Let 
us in return exact from every man the fullest 
performance of duty, the fullest loyalty to our 
flag, and the most resolute effort to serve it. 

The test of our worth now is the service we 
render. Sacrifice? Yes, as an incident of 
service; but let us think only of the service, not 
of the sacrifice. There never yet was a service 
worth rendering that did not entail sacrifice; 
and no man renders the highest service if he 
thinks overmuch of the sacrifice. 

Let us pay with our bodies for our souls' 
desire ! 



57 



CHAPTER III 

THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

\\ZE Americans are the children of the 
crucible. The crucible does not do its 
work unless it turns out those cast into it in one 
national mould; and that must be the mould es- 
tablished by Washington and his fellows when 
they made us into a nation. We must be Ameri- 
cans; and nothing else. Yet the events of the 
past three years bring us face to face with the 
question whether in the present century we are 
to continue as a separate nation at all or whether 
we are to become merely a huge polyglot board- 
ing house and counting house, in which dollar 
hunters of twenty different nationalities scramble 
for gain, while each really pays his soul-alle- 
giance to some foreign power. 

We are now at war with Germany. For 
three years Germany has heaped insult upon 
insult, injury upon injury, on our people. We 
showed a reluctance passing the bounds of ordi- 
nary timidity either to resent the insults or to 
prepare for defense. We feared to resent wrong 
in the present. We did not even dare to pre- 

58 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

pare so as to be able effectively to resent wrong 
in the future. Our supine inaction was partly 
due to the folly engendered in our people by 
the professional pacifists. But an even more 
important factor was the dread many of our 
politicians felt not merely of the German Army 
abroad but of German votes at home. The cold, 
greedy selfishness and short-sightedness of our 
political leaders were indefensible; and were 
due to the fact that the men who took the lead 
in the professional German-American move- 
ment sought entirely to subordinate the actions 
of the country of which they were nominally 
citizens, the United States, to the needs of the 
country for which they really cared, Germany. 
Now we are at open war with Germany; yet 
many of these persons — supported of course by 
the professional pacifists — continue to champion 
Germany's cause as against the cause for which 
we are fighting. This is moral treason to the 
Republic, and all who engage in it, whether 
senators, congressmen, editors, or professed 
humanitarians, are in fact, although not in law, 
traitors, who have no right longer to be treated 
as American citizens. The time has come to 
insist that they now drop their dual allegiance, 
and in good faith become outright Germans or 
outright Americans. They cannot be both; and 
those who pretend that they are both, are 

59 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

merely Germans who hypocritically pretend 
to be Americans in order to serve Ger- 
many and damage America. At the moment, 
the vital thing to remember about these half- 
hidden traitors is that to attack America's allies, 
while we are at death grips with a peculiarly 
ruthless and brutal foe, or to champion that foe 
as against our allies, or to apologize for that foe's 
infamous wrong-doing, or to clamor for an early 
and inconclusive peace, is to be false to the 
cause of liberty and to the United States. 

In this war, either a man is a good American, 
and therefore is against Germany, and in favor 
of the allies of America, or he is not an Ameri- 
can at all, and should be sent back to Germany 
where he belongs. There are no stancher 
Americans in the country than the average 
Americans who are in whole or in part of Ger- 
man descent; and all these are as stanchly 
against Germany now as the Americans of Eng- 
lish descent were against Great Britain in 1776. 
I speak of them with knowledge; for German 
blood runs in my own veins. But the American 
of German descent who remains a German or a 
half-German is not an American at all; and a 
large number of the men of this type are dan- 
gerous traitors who ought instantly to be sent 
out of the country. These men work steadily 
against America in the company of the native- 

60 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

American professional pacifists, and the pro- 
German Socialists, and all the anti-English for- 
eigners. Some of these pro-German and anti- 
American leaders have been advocating that 
men of German descent should not be required 
to serve in our armies against Germany. This 
is precisely as if in the Revolutionary War it 
had been proposed that men of English descent 
should not serve against England. Such a pro- 
posal should be regarded as treasonable, and all 
men making it should be treated accordingly. 

Many of these German sympathizers, of these 
foes of the United States (including not only 
men of German descent but men of Irish descent 
whose blind hatred of England makes them dis- 
loyal to America, and men of native origin, 
who are conscienceless politicians or who are 
pacifists or denationalized and therefore 
thoroughly unpatriotic) fear openly to assail 
our country; and therefore they serve our coun- 
try's enemies effectively by assailing England, 
by endeavoring to keep us from effective co- 
operation with the allies, or by condoning and 
defending such acts of barbarity as the Zeppelin 
raids on English cities and the murderous as- 
saults on ships crowded with innocent non-com- 
batants. 

In the Revolutionary War France was our 
ally. Fifteen years before she had been our 

6i 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

bitter enemy. Therefore certain Tories en- 
deavored to harm the American cause by re- 
viving the old anti-French animosities. They 
acted precisely as the men act who to-day seek 
to harm the United States and help our ruthless 
and bitter enemy, Germany, by reviving the old 
anti-British enmity. Any man who during the 
Revolution stated that although he favored the 
United States against England nevertheless he 
also favored England against France, was really 
a traitor to America. Any man who now an- 
nounces that although he favors the United 
States against Germany yet he favors Germany 
against England is a traitor to America. There 
can be no half and half attitude in this war, and 
no honorable man can afford to take such an 
attitude. We are now bound by every con- 
sideration of loyalty and good faith to our 
allies, and any opposition to them or any aid 
given to their and our enemy is basely dishonor- 
able as regards our allies, and treasonable as 
regards our own country. 

Weak-kneed apologists for infamy say that 
it is ^'natural" for American citizens of German 
origin to favor Germany. This is nonsense, and 
criminal nonsense to boot. Any American citi- 
zen who thus feels should be sent straight back 
to Germany, where he belongs. We can have no 
''fifty-fifty'' allegiance in this country. Either 

62 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

a man is an American and nothing else, or he is 
not an American at all. We are akin by blood 
and descent to most of the nations of Europe; 
but we are separate from all of them; we are 
a new and distinct nation, and we are bound 
always to give our whole-hearted and undi- 
vided loyalty to our own flag, and in any in- 
ternational crisis to treat each and every foreign 
nation purely according to its conduct in that 
crisis. 

This is a new nation, based on a mighty con- 
tinent, of boundless possibilities. No other na- 
tion in the world has such resources. No other 
nation has ever been so favored. If we dare to 
rise level to the opportunities offered us, our 
destiny will be vast beyond the power of imagi- 
nation. We must master this destiny, and make 
it our own; and we can thus make it our own 
only if we, as a vigorous and separate nation, 
develop a great and wonderful nationality, dis- 
tinctively different from any other nationality, 
of either the present or the past. For such a 
nation all of us can well afford to give up all 
other allegiances, and high of heart to stand, a 
mighty and united people, facing a future of 
glorious promise. 

This nation was founded because the Ameri- 
cans of 1776, although predominately English 
by blood, fought their own kinsmen to establish 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

their liberty and to make this nation the hope 
of the world. Again, over a century ago, our 
forefathers once more fought England; and the 
men in this country who were of English blood 
stood with absolute loyalty by America and 
against England. It is not merely our right 
but our duty to insist on exactly the same full- 
hearted loyalty by all Americans of other de- 
scent, whenever we are at war with the coun- 
tries from which their ancestors came. We are 
now at war with Germany. The offenses com- 
mitted against the men of 1776 by King George 
and the England of his day were as nothing 
compared to the crimes committed against us 
and against all civilization and humanity by the 
brutalized Germany of the Hohenzollerns dur- 
ing the last three years. There must be the 
same unhesitating loyalty shown now, by every 
American fit to call himself an American, as was 
shown in the days of our forefathers, when Paul 
Revere's ride and the fight of the Minute Men 
at Lexington called the country to arms. 

The obligation of single-minded Americanism 
has two sides — one as important as the other. 
On the one hand, every man of foreign birth 
or parentage must in good faith become an 
American and nothing else; for any man who 
tries to combine loyalty to this country with 
loyalty to some other country inevitably, when 

64 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

the strain arises, becomes disloyal to this coun- 
try — he who is not with us is against us. 

On the other hand, if a man in good faith, in 
soul and in body, becomes an American, he 
stands on a full and entire equality with every- 
body else, and must be so treated, without any 
mental reservation, without any regard to his 
creed, or birthplace or descent. One obligation 
is just as binding as the other. It is both weak 
and wicked to permit any of our citizens to hold 
a dual or divided allegiance; and it is just as 
mischievous, just as un-American, to discrim- 
inate against any good American, because of 
his birthplace, creed or parentage. 

Let us immediately and practically apply these 
principles in the present crisis. A former mem- 
ber of my cabinet, who was born in Germany 
and who does not profess my religious creed, 
but who is in every way precisely as good an 
American as I am, has sent me cuttings from 
the New York Times which contain extracts 
from statements issued by the United States 
Government to the Red Cross societies, in which 
the Red Cross units and hospital units intended 
for service at the base hospitals abroad are 
directed to exclude from service not merely 
American citizens born in Germany or Austria- 
Hungary but even Americans whose fathers 
were born in thos^ countries. I most em- 

65 . . 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

phatically protest against such discrimination. 
It represents the kind of attack on loyalty which 
tends actually to encourage disloyalty. 

There have been instances of misconduct on 
the part of Germans in American hospital or 
Red Cross units; but this was due to the fact 
that our Government was then unduly influenced 
by fear of the German Government abroad or 
of the German vote at home, and so dared not 
act in the drastic manner necessary. Now it 
swings to the opposite extreme and offsets its 
former fear of punishing German offenders by 
failure in the present to guard the rights and 
the self-respect of loyal Americans of German 
origin. 

If I had been permitted to raise the four 
divisions of troops for service abroad which 
Congress gave me permission to raise, among 
the regular officers whom I would have recom- 
mended for command of the divisions and 
brigades would have been General Kuhn, the 
present head of the War College, and Colonel 
Bandholtz, who, when I was President, served 
as Chief of Constabulary in the Philippines; 
and I would have counted myself happy to have 
served under either. Of the regular officers 
whom I had chosen to recommend as Colonels 
of various regiments in the division were four 
of German parentage or descent. Among the 

66 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

few men not in the regular army whom I should 
have recommended for colonelcies, one, a Na- 
tional Guard Colonel, from Chicago, is of Ger- 
man parentage, and he informed me that of 
the troops he would raise in Chicago probably 
85% would be of foreign parentage. My head- 
quarters chaplain would have been a retired 
army officer, who was born in Germany — a man 
not of my religious faith. He is as good a citi- 
zen and as thoroughly an American of the best 
type as is to be found anywhere in this land. 
My brigade Quartermaster General would have 
been a man of German parentage. Now, if I 
had been permitted to take these men abroad to 
fight, I would have tolerated no discrimination 
from any source or of any kind between the 
Americans of Revolutionary stock and the 
Americans of foreign birth or parentage; and in 
return I would have demanded of all of them, 
with absolute disregard of all considerations of 
national origin, an undivided and whole-hearted 
allegiance to the one flag that floats over all 
of us. 

What is true of military life is true of civil 
life. The man who for the past fifteen years has 
been my closest political friend, and who is also 
one of my closest personal friends, is of German 
parentage, as is his wife — and the fathers of 
both of them were Union soldiers in the Civil 

67 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

War. They are both of them exactly as good 
Americans as I am. If they don't "belong/' 
then I don't '^belong." In my Cabinet, when,. 
I was President, sat a descendant of one of 
Blucher's colonels. Some of the best books 
written about our duty in this war have been 
written by men who are, in whole or in part, of 
German blood — James Beck, Owen Wister, 
Gustavus Ohlinger and Hermann Hagerdorn. 
I have just received a letter from one of my 
old captains of the Spanish War, a man born 
in Germany, running in part: "I can stand as 
much now as I could in the Spanish War, and 
I am ready and anxious to go whenever you 
say; as matters now are, every American citi- 
zen must stand by his country, and anyone that 
is not willing to do so should not be tolerated 
here." One of the naturalists who was with 
me in my South African exploration is now in 
our volunteer army with an officer's commis- 
sion; his father was born in Germany. One 
of the naturalists who was with me in Africa 
(a joint author with me of a scientific book on 
the big game of Africa), a man who is now 
on a trip of scientific exploration in China, was 
born here of German parents. He has recently 
written me: "We have just learned that 
America has finally declared war on Germany. 
This good news has restored our hopes for our 

6S 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

country and its manhood. I hope that America 
will make the declaration more than a matter of 
'moral support' and will succeed by force of 
arms in materially shortening the task of sub- 
duing Germany and Austria and Turkey even 
at this apparently eleventh hour of the great 
struggle." 

There spoke the true American spirit! These 
three men are Americans, precisely as I am; 
they are not German- Americans any more than 
I am a Dutch-American or an Anglo-American. 
We are all of us Americans, and nothing else; 
we all have equal rights and equal obligations; 
we form part of one people, in the face of all 
other nations, paying allegiance only to one 
flag; and a wrong to any one of us is a wrong 
to all the rest of us. 

The men of whom I speak, and countless 
others like them, represent the best and most 
intense Americanism; they teach and they prac- 
tice the highest service, and the most patriotic 
devotion to our common country, in the face of 
no matter what foreign foe; they are fit to 
guide our thoughts and rule our councils in peace 
and to lead our armies in war. Any one of 
these men who are born here, no matter where 
their ancestors were born, may become Presi- 
dent; all are liable to serve in our armies; and 
yet our Government permits them to be ex- 

69 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

eluded from service with the Red Cross. It is 
a base and unworthy thing for any section of 
our people, and above all for our Government, 
to discriminate, or permit even the slightest 
discrimination, against these, our fellow Ameri- 
cans. They "belong,'' exactly as much as the 
rest of us do. We are one; and we will tolerate 
no effort to divide us. 

So much for one side of our twofold duty. 
Now for the other side. The men who enjoy 
the privileges of American citizenship, and yet 
seek in any way to serve some other nation 
which is hostile to us, are guilty of moral 
treason to the Republic. If possible, the Gov- 
ernment should act against them; if not, then 
they should be made to feel the full weight of 
the sternest condemnation by the people as a 
whole. Germany is now our bitter and en- 
venomed foe. She has repeatedly and brutally 
murdered our women and children and defense- 
less men. She has proposed to join with Mexico 
and Japan to dismember us. Her publicists and 
newspaper writers back up, with foul abuse and 
untruthfulness, the efficient brutality which her 
military men have exercised at our expense and 
at the expense of the tortured and heroic people 
of Belgium and of northern France. Whoever 
now upholds or justifies Germany is an enemy 
of the United States. Recently certain public 

70 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

men and newspapers — newspapers published in 
German and newspapers published in English — 
have sought to apologize for such German in- 
famies as the submarine war against non-com- 
batants, and the destruction of undefended and 
peaceful cities, by saying that we would behave 
in like manner if we had the opportunity. The 
infamous falsity of such accusations is shown 
by the history of our Civil War, in which the 
most intense and bitter excitement of passion 
never betrayed the combatants on either side 
into for one moment permitting such organized 
atrocities as those of which the Germans have 
been guilty. Turn to Emerson's "Life of 
Charles Russell Lowell,'' the nephew of the 
poet Lowell; read his letter to the War Depart- 
ment of June 26, 1863, in which he condemns 
the burning of a deserted town, and says that 
to permit "burning and pillaging" will turn the 
troops into a "horde of savages" ; and then think 
of the fury of indignation this typical American 
officer would have shown over the hideous 
atrocities committed in Louvain and Dinant and 
hundreds of other places in Belgium and north- 
ern France. The deed he condemned was by 
comparison so slight that to-day the wretched 
victims of the German army would treat it as a 
mercy. Or contrast the brutality shown toward 
women and children on the Lusitania and scores 

71 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

of other ships, by the officially directed German 
submarines, with the Alabama s action fifty 
years previous ; Semmes never destroyed a vessel 
without providing for the safety of the pas- 
sengers and crew; he turned his own officers 
out of their cabins to put in them the women 
and children of his foes; and once when he had 
700 prisoners, and a prize, the Ariel, he actually 
permitted them to go in freedom on the vessel 
rather than send them to a nearby port when 
he found that there was yellow fever in this 
port. Compare these actions with the methodical 
and organized brutality of the German military 
authorities in this war; and then brand with 
shame the American traitors who seek to aid 
Germany by asserting that we, if given the 
chance, would be guilty of atrocities like those 
she has committed. 

The American citizens who traitorously 
preach such doctrines sometimes preach them in 
the English tongue, sometimes in the German. 
Those who use the former are the more despic- 
able; but those who use the latter are the more 
dangerous because the great bulk of their loya 
fellow citizens are ignorant of the speech in 
which they write treason. The events of the 
last few years have made it evident that in this 
country we should not only refuse to tolerate a 
divided allegiance but also that we should insist 

72 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

on one speech. We must have in this country 
but one flag, the American flag, and for the 
speech of the people but one language, the Eng- 
lish language. There is no analogy with the 
European countries where different nationalities 
of different tongues have coalesced or been con- 
quered, and where therefore it is an injustice not 
to replace the Greater Bohemia, the greater 
Jugo-Slavia, the old-time Poland, the old-time 
Lithuania in the ranks of self-governing coun- 
tries, each with its own speech. But any man 
who comes here, whether he be a German, a 
Slav, an Italian, a man from the British Islands 
or the Scandinavian countries, or anyone else, 
if he becomes a citizen at all either commits per- 
jury or else becomes an American, and only an 
American, and specifically foreswears all alle- 
giance to his former country and its ruler. 
Either he has committed perjury, or else he has 
ceased to be a German, or an Englishman, or an 
Irishman, or a Slav, or a Frenchman, and has 
become an American, and only an American. 
He must adopt the institutions of the United 
States, and therefore he must adopt the language 
which is now the native tongue of our people, 
no matter what the several strains of blood in 
our veins may be. It would be not merely a 
misfortune but a crime to perpetuate differences 
of language in this country, for it would mean 

73 



THE FOES OF OOR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

failure on our part to become in reality a nation. 
Many of the newspapers published in foreign 
tongues are of high character and have done 
and are doing capital work, by helping the im- 
migrants who speak these tongues during the 
transition period before they become citizens. 
These papers deserve hearty recognition for 
their work. But it must be recognized as transi- 
tion work, and therefore its usefulness must be 
recognized as conditioned upon its finally coming 
to an end. This is as true of the use of a for- 
eign language in schools and churches as in 
newspapers. I belong to the Dutch Reformed 
Church; it is now an entirely American church; 
yet when my grandfather was a young man, 
the services were still conducted in Dutch, and 
until this practice was stopped the church 
dwindled. Exactly as we must have but one 
flag, so we should have but one tongue, the 
tongue of the Declaration of Independence, of 
Washington's Farewell Address, of Lincoln's 
Gettysburg Speech and Second Inaugural. 

The Cologne Gazette of June lo brazenly 
declares that the German-Americans of the 
United States are the "best allies" of Germany 
against the United States, and rejoices in the 
fact that these German-Arhericans "embarrass 
and restrain'' us in the war. The German- 
American Alliance stands among the foremost 

74 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

of the organizations which have thus worked 
against the interests of the United States; and 
the most prominent German newspapers in New 
York and Chicago during the last three years, 
at the time of the Lusitania infamy and since, 
have richly deserved the ominous and sinister 
praise of the Cologne Gazette and the other 
organs of the German autocracy. The German- 
American organizations and newspapers have 
served Germany against the United States. They 
seek to embarrass and restrain our Government 
so as to bring victory for Germany over the 
United States. They may have kept within the 
law, but they have been guilty of moral treason 
against the Republic. 

The Philadelphia North American, with 
equal courage and patriotism, has called to ac- 
count the German newspapers of Philadelphia, 
which have shown similar disloyalty to the 
Republic. It conducted an investigation into the 
matter these German newspapers had been pub- 
lishing; the investigation, by the way, being 
made by Mr. Einar Barfod, an American of 
Scandinavian birth, but just as straight an 
American as exists — and as he writes in Eng- 
lish his fellow Americans can understand him. 
The North American proved that the German 
papers in question were in effect behaving as 
enemies of the United States in this war, sneer- 

75 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ing at and misrepresenting our country, and 
violently attacking our allies, especially Eng- 
land, and praising and upholding Germany and 
the Kaiser in extravagant terms. The worst 
offender was a socialist paper. This was 
natural; for the German socialists in the 
United States, who for years have been the 
leaders in the American Socialist Party, have 
in this war shown themselves not only disloyal 
to the United States but traitors to humanity 
and to democracy, and tools of the unscrupulous 
militaristic autocracy of the Hohenzollerns. The 
censor at Washington should deal with such a 
paper and not leave the matter to the North 
American, 

These German papers of course like to quote 
Americans of the stamp of Senator La Follette 
who in this great crisis stand as hostile to the 
cause of the American people and of liberty 
loving mankind, occupying a position like that 
which the Vallandighams of the Civil War oc- 
cupied in relation to the cause of the Union. 
During this war we should not permit the pub- 
lication in the United States of any German 
paper, or any paper published in the tongue of 
any of our enemies. 

I condemn these men. But I condemn more 
strongly the foes of our own household who, 
for political reasons, or from sheer, easy-going, 

76 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

selfish inertness, have encouraged or acquiesced 
in what they have done. Prior to the war 
ignorance or lack of foresight in this matter was 
perhaps excusable. But since the outbreak of 
the war the action of the German Government 
and the action of the German-Americans, who, 
whether for hire or for other reasons, in this 
country played the game of Germany, have been 
so flagrantly evil that to be ignorant of them 
was impossible, and to fail to denounce them 
was explicable only on the ground of folly, 
cowardice or moral obliquity. 

The actions of the agents of Germany in this 
country have ranged from seditious propaganda 
to attacks by dynamite on property and mur- 
derous assaults on life. They were accurately 
described by President Wilson in his message to 
Congress of December 7, 191 5, as follows: 

"There are citizens of the United States, I 
blush to admit, born under other flags . . . who 
have poured the poison of disloyalty into the 
very arteries of our national life; who have 
sought to bring the authority and good name of 
our Government into contempt, to destroy our 
industries wherever they thought it effective for 
their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and 
to debase our politics to the purposes of foreign 
intrigue . . . such creatures of passion, dis- 
loyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out . . . 

17 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

they are infinitely malignant . . . they have 
formed plots to destroy property, they have en- 
tered into conspiracies against the neutrality of 
the Government, they have sought to pry into 
every confidential transaction of the Govern- 
ment in order to serve interests alien to our 
own/' 

Having thus spoken of the German spies, 
dynamiters, and murderers in this country, the 
President proceeded to state that they were no 
worse than the Americans whose judgment and 
sense of honorable obligation made them sympa- 
thize with Belgium and the allies, in contrast 
with the Germany which had employed the spies, 
dynamiters and murderers against the United 
States. He said that "every man'' should "make 
it his duty and his pride to keep the scales of 
judgment even and prove himself a partisan of 
no nation but his own." He continued by 
reprobating the "men among us" who although 
"calling themselves Americans have so far for- 
gotten themselves and their honor as citizens as 
to put their paramount sympathy with one or 
the other side in the great European conflict 
above their regard for the peace ... of the 
United States. They also preach and practice 
disloyalty. No laws, I suppose, can reach cor- 
ruption of the mind and heart; but I should not 
speak of others without also speaking of these 

78 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

and expressing the even deeper humiliation and 
scorn which every self-possessed and thought- 
fully patriotic American must feel when he 
thinks of them and of the discredit they are 
daily bringing upon us/* 

This was a carefully prepared, deliberately 
phrased official message to Congress. When 
the message was written the war had lasted for 
over sixteen months. It was precisely as much 
a war "to make the world safe for democracy" 
then as it is now; unless this statement was true 
at that time it was a mere rhetorical flourish, 
an untruth, sixteen months later. Every cause 
alleged as a reason for our going to war against 
Germany sixteen months later existed then. 
Seven months had elapsed since the sinking of 
the Lusitania; and the sinkings of other pas- 
senger and freight ships, with the attendant 
murders of innocent non-combatants, including 
scores of American women and children, had 
continued month by month. The hideous nature 
of the German outrages in Belgium, Servia, 
Poland, and Northern France had been officially 
established and made known to every human 
being who was not wilfully blind to the truth. 
The various outrages by German spies and 
dynamiters in the United States, and the in- 
trigues of the Germans against this Government, 
were due to the direct action of the German Gov- 

79 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ernment, usually working through the German 
Embassy in Washington; this was known to 
every Government official from the President 
down, and was so self-evident that no reason- 
ably intelligent and well-informed private citizen 
was ignorant of the truth. 

It was under these conditions that the head 
of our Government officially declared that the 
American citizen who declined ''to keep the 
scales of judgment even" between tortured Bel- 
gium and the Germany that wronged and tor- 
tured her was guilty of "corruption of the mind 
and heart," which put him on the same plane 
of "disloyalty" with the other "citizens of the 
United States" who were "creatures of anarchy" 
and "sought to destroy our industries," by dyna- 
mite, with murder as an incident. The head of 
our Government officially declared on behalf of 
the American people that the Americans who, 
after the murder by Germany of hundreds of in- 
nocent American men, women and children on 
the Lusitania and other boats, expressed pas- 
sionate sympathy "against" Germany without 
"regard for the peace of the United States" were 
causes of "even deeper humiliation and scorn" to 
"thoughtfully patriotic" persons than were the 
German spies, intriguers, and murderers them- 
selves. Incidentally, of course, if these Ameri- 
cans who stood for America and Belgium and 

80 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

against Germany in December, 191 5, were at that 
time proper subjects for "scorn and humiliation," 
and were guilty of "corruption of the mind and 
heart'' and of "disloyalty," then every American 
who took part in or approved and supported our 
going to war in April, 19 16, was similarly guilty 
of corruption and disloyalty, and equally a sub- 
ject for humiliation and scorn. Neither the 
situation nor the duty of America had changed 
in the smallest degree during the intervening 
sixteen months. 

This address apparently at the time met the 
approval of most politicians, and there was little 
adverse criticism of it; and therefore we, the 
American people, became responsible for the 
doctrine that the German spies, intriguers and 
dynamiters were no worse than the men who 
sympathized with the wrongs of Belgium, or 
jeopardized "peace" by demanding action against 
Germany on account of the Lusitania horror. 
It is axiomatic that to condemn, equally, good 
and bad actions is completely to destroy all 
effect of the condemnation of the bad. The 
net result of the conduct of the American poli- 
ticians — which was not repudiated by the Ameri- 
can people — was really to encourage Germany 
and her German-American allies in their cam- 
paign against the United States, and to dis- 
courage and dishearten the great mass of 

81 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

American citizens of German blood who needed 
only fearless official leadership in order to make 
them the most effective of all possible instru- 
ments against the disloyal German propaganda. 
We Americans must ourselves shoulder the 
major share of the responsibility for the ef- 
fectiveness of this pro-German and anti-Ameri- 
can movement within our own borders. 

Here again it would not be worth while men- 
tioning the evil we have done in the past were 
it not necessary to do so in order by concrete 
example to warn us against its repetition in the 
future. Unless we realize the full menace of 
the wrong we have done humanity, and the 
danger we have caused ourselves by our course 
as a nation during the last three years, we can 
not in the future provide against a repetition of 
such wrong-doing by our governmental leaders. 
It is we, ourselves, who during these trials have 
— among other things — done most to puzzle our 
citizens of foreign birth as to the real meaning 
of their "true faith and allegiance." 

Not only must we as a people never again 
permit such conduct among our political leaders 
as that which has signalized our attitude in in- 
ternational and preparedness matters during the 
last three years; but we must hereafter adopt 
an affirmative instead of a merely negative atti- 
tude toward the stranger within our gates who 

S2 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

has come here to become a citizen or merely to 
make a fortune and return to his former home. 
We should exercise the strictest control over, 
and wherever necessary entirely exclude, the 
transitory laborer who does not intend to be- 
come a citizen. As for those who do intend to 
become citizens, we should consider them pri- 
marily as possible citizens and parents of future 
citizens. We cannot have too many of the 
right type — the type that is right morally, 
physically and economically — and we should 
have none at all of the wrong type. We should 
never admit any merely because there is "need 
of labor"; better run short of labor than foul or 
dilute the body of citizenship into which our 
children are to enter. In practice it is not easy 
to apply exactly the proper tests; but funda- 
mentally our aim should be to admit only immi- 
grants whose grandchildren will be fit to inter- 
marry with our grandchildren, with the 
grandchildren of the Americans of to-day. 

We wish no further additions to the persons 
whose affection for this country is merely a 
species of pawnbroker patriotism, of pork barrel 
patriotism. In so far as these are native Ameri- 
cans, let us strive to get rid of them; and let us 
not add to them by the importation from abroad 
of persons whose coming here represents noth- 
ing but the purpose to change one feeding 

83 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

trough for another feeding trough. We should 
guarantee to the newcomer his rights, and we 
should exact from him the full performance of 
his duties. 

We should provide for every immigrant, by 
day schools for the young and night schools for 
the adult, the chance to learn English; and if 
after say five years he has not learned English, 
he should be sent back to the land from whence 
he came. We should have a system of labor 
exchanges and employment bureaus which will 
enable us to distribute the immigrants to the 
places where they are most needed and can do 
most for their own advancement. We should 
protect them from fraud and rapacity. 

And having thus protected them we should 
demand full performance of duty from them. 
Every man of them should be required to serve 
a year with the colors, like our native born 
youth, before being allowed to vote. Nothing 
would do more to make him feel an American 
among his fellow Americans, on an equality of 
rights, of duties and of loyalty to the flag. 

There is no truth more important than the 
truth that it is the performance of duty toward 
the commonwealth, and not the enjoyment of 
unearned privilege from the commonwealth, that 
breeds loyalty, devotion, patriotism. In a family, 
the father and mother who fail to rear their sons 

84 



THE CHILDREN OF THE CRUCIBLE 

and daughters to recognize and perform their 
duties neither receive nor deserve the loyal de- 
votion felt for the heads of the household where 
the whole household is trained to put duty 
ahead of pleasure. It is exactly the same with 
a nation. 

We have believed that we would get devotion 
to our country from immigrants who came here 
merely to make money and escape meeting obli- 
gations. The belief was ill founded. The man 
who feels that the country owes him everything 
and that he owes the country nothing, will pay 
the country just what he thinks he owes — 
nothing. It is a curious fact that many Ger- 
mans who came here to avoid military service, 
and who while here have had to do nothing they 
did not care to do, yet as soon as the strain 
came, felt all their loyalty toward the country 
which exacted much from its citizens, and none 
at all for the country which expected nothing 
from its citizens. 

The wisest and quickest way to Americanize 
the immigrant is to make him understand that 
here in America we have at last waked up to 
our needs, and that henceforth;^ every man, 
whether born here or abroad, owes this country 
the fullest service of body and of soul. 



8s 



CHAPTER IV 

WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

Let Us To-day Do as They Did and Practice 
What They Preached 



T 



HERE is nothing sillier and more mis- 
chievous than to dull the conscience with 
lofty sentiments which cloak ignoble failure to 
perform duty; or to praise the great men of the 
past for what they did in the past and yet refuse 
to act in similar fashion in the present. 

Lip loyalty to Washington and Lincoln costs 
nothing and is worth just exactly what it costs. 
What counts is the application of their principles 
to the conditions of to-day. Whoever is too 
proud to fight, whoever believes that there are 
times when it is not well to arouse the spirit of 
patriotism, whoever demands peace without vic- 
tory, whoever regards the demand for ample 
preparedness as hysterical, whoever attacks con- 
scription and the draft or fails to uphold uni- 
versal, obligatory, military service, is false to 
the teachings and lives of Washington and Lin- 
coln. Whoever seeks office, or upholds a can- 

86 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

didate for office, on the ground that he ''kept 
us out of war/' without regard to whether the 
honor and vital interests of the nation and of 
mankind demand the war, is treacherous to 
the principles of Washington and Lincoln; they 
did not "keep us out of war," and they never 
sought or accepted office on a platform which 
they cynically repudiated when once they had 
secured office. The professional pacifist, who 
exalts peace above righteousness, is not only a 
traitor to the memory of the two greatest Ameri- 
cans, but has no claim to have any part in 
governing or in voting in the nation which one 
founded and the other preserved. 

Washington's career, taken as a whole, and 
considering all that he did as soldier and states- 
man during his twenty years of leadership in 
American public life, probably placed him on an 
even higher level of great achievement than 
Lincoln. But he lacked Lincoln's marvelous 
power of expression. In his case it is the deeds 
alone to which we must generally look. In 
Lincoln's case we consider both the deeds and 
the winged and deathless words which he trans- 
lated into deeds. 

Yet, just because Washington never spoke a 
word which he did not make good by an act, 
and always acted with serene, far-sighted wis- 
dom and entire fearlessness, there are teachings 

87 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

of his which should be forever engraved on 
our hearts. No American should ever forget || 
Washington's insistence upon the absolute 
necessity of preserving the Union ; his appeals 
to our people that they should cherish the 
American nationality has something indestruct- 
ible from within and as separating us in clear-cut 
manner from all other nations; his stern refusal 
to yield to the tyranny of either an individual 
or a mob, and his demand that we seek both 
liberty and order as indispensable to the life 
of a democratic republic; and his unwearied 
persistence in preaching the great truth that 
military preparedness is essential to our self- 
respect and usefulness and that the only way to 
prepare for war is to prepare in time of peace. 
But it is worse than useless to praise these as 
abstract truths and to fail to apply them to 
present instances. Every public man who after 
the August day in 19 14 when the great war 
broke out, failed at once to do all in his power 
to prepare this nation on a gigantic scale for 
the danger looming in our immediate front was 
blind and deaf to the writings and warnings of 
Washington and was recreant to his duty to the 
Republic; and so were all the apologists and up- 
holders of such a man. 

Washington's Farewell Address contains ad- 
vice which is permanently applicable. At the 

88 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

time when the address was written a violent 
faction of his countrymen were endeavoring to 
secure the submission of the United States to 
the outrages and insults of Revolutionary and 
Directorial France by appealing to and inflam- 
ing the American antipathy to England. Wash- 
ington's Address condemned the effort thus to 
make hatred of England blind us to our duty to 
the United States as follows: "Nothing is more 
essential (to a free, enlightened and great na- 
tion) than that permanent, inveterate antipathies 
against particular nations ... be excluded. 
The nation which indulges toward another an 
habitual hatred ... is in some degree a slave." 
This applies with even greater force to the 
sinister enemies of our country who at this 
moment endeavor to serve German brutality at 
the expense of the United States and of human- 
ity at large by stirring up antipathy to Eng- 
land. When Washington wrote his address he 
was separated by but sixteen years from that 
winter camp at Valley Forge in which, under 
his leadership, the manhood of democratic and 
liberty-loving America stood its supreme test. 
We are separated from it by a century and a 
quarter. He had faced the British bullets. The 
anti-English agitators of to-day shriek against 
England in complete personal safety. The Eng- 
land of his day was still hostile to the United 

89 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

States. The England of our day has been 
friendly to the United States for half a century. 
The men who at this crisis try in any way to 
stir up our people against Britain are traitors 
to the United States. Some of them are the 
paid agents of America's malignant foe, Ger- 
many. The rest, whether from folly or wicked- 
ness, are playing Germany's game. No man 
is a true American who hates another country 
more than he loves his own. 

What is true of the teachings of Washington 
and Lincoln as regards our international rela- 
tions is no less true of their teachings as regards 
affairs within our own household. 

It has been the fashion among some well- 
meaning but crude extremists to contrast Lin- 
coln as a radical with Washington as a con- 
servative. This is a shallow misreading of the 
facts. Each was the conservative leader of the 
efficient radicalism of his time. In each case 
the radicalism became efficient only because such 
leadership was furnished. It would have been 
absurd to expect either to be a radical about 
matters which in his time were not yet in real 
existence. To the Bourbons of his own day, to 
the Tories or the copperheads, each seemed the 
most dangerous of radicals ; and when necessary, 
as in the crises of 1776, and 1862-3, each took 
the extreme radical position. But by the ex- 

90 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

tremists, whether visionary or sinister, each was 
denounced as a reactionary — the sympathizers 
with Hcense and disorganization taking this posi- 
tion about Washington from 1789 to the day of 
his death, just as the extreme radicals in Mis- 
souri and elsewhere took the same position about 
Lincoln in 1864. To use the terminology of to- 
day each preferred an attitude of liberalism 
rather than radicalism until the arrogant ob- 
scurantism of the reactionaries themselves — 
George III in one case, the slaveocracy in the 
other — made radicalism imperative. When this 
became evident, neither one hesitated to cut 
loose from the trimmers and halfway men and 
unfalteringly to lead the effective fight against 
Bourbonism; and of course each then practiced 
a constructive, and not merely a destructive, 
radicalism. 

Lincoln was always against slavery, but until 
the upholders of slavery, in 1854, became vio- 
lently aggressive, he stood by Clay and Webster 
and against the abolitionists; and at first he re- 
mained a Whig, not becoming a Republican for 
several months after the formation of the party. 
He upheld Clay's compromise measures. He 
took Webster's position on the fugitive slave 
law — it is one of the melancholy ironies of his- 
tory that the very men who abandoned and 
frantically denounced Webster for taking this 

91 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

position, later turned ardently to Lincoln, who 
had also taken it and who did not change from 
his position until the Civil War had begun. 
During the Civil War the radicals of the Wade- 
Davis type denounced him almost as bitterly as 
the conservatives who followed Seymour or 
Vallandingham ; and the extremists among them 
nominated a presidential candidate against him. 

Yet Lincoln was a great radical. He was of 
course a wise and cautious radical — otherwise 
he could have done nothing for the forward 
movement. But he was the efficient leader of 
this forward movement. To-day many well- 
meaning men who have permitted themselves to 
fossilize, to become mere ultra-conservative 
reactionaries, to reject and oppose all progress, 
but who still pay a conventional and perfunc- 
tory homage to Lincoln's memory, will do 
well to remember exactly what it was for which 
this great conservative leader of radicalism 
actually stood. 

Much of what he said applies, wtih only a 
change of names, to the conditions of our own 
time. 

In October, 1854, when it was objected that 
the course he advocated included some action 
demanded by the Northern abolitionists, and 
other action demanded by the Southern 
disunionists, to both of whom he had been op- 

92 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

posed, he answered : * "Stand with anybody that 
stands right. Stand with him while he is right 
and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand 
with the aboHtionist in restoring the Missouri 
compromise and stand against him in attempt- 
ing to repeal the fugitive slave law. In the 
latter case you stand with the Southern dis- 
unionist. What of that? You are still right. 
In both cases you are right. In both cases you 
oppose the dangerous extremes. In both you 
stand on middle ground and hold the ship steady 
and level. In both you are national and nothing 
less than national. To desert such ground be- 
cause of any company is to be less than a man — 
less than an American." And he remarked of 
those who took the opposite view that he must be 
allowed "to tell them, good humoredly," that 
their course was "very silly.'' 

In precisely similar fashion to-day we find 
conservatives objecting to some piece of wise 
legislation because it is demanded by the 
socialists, and radicals objecting to some piece 
of wise legislation of another kind, because it 
is looked upon favorably by Wall Street. In 
Lincoln's words we must be allowed good 
humoredly to say that both attitudes are very 
silly — equally so whether we always oppose the 
Socialists or always oppose Wall Street. In 

* I omit the sentence addressed merely to his fellow Whigs. 

93 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

one case we uphold what the Socialists demand, 
in the other case what Wall Street favors. In 
Lincoln's words: "What of it? We are still 
right. In both cases we are right." 

In August, 1863, Lincoln dealt with the ques- 
tions of peace and war and the means necessary 
to make war a success. To his critics, who put 
peace above national salvation secured through 
war, he said: "You desire peace and you blame 
me that we do not have it. But how can we 
attain it ? There are but three conceivable ways. 
First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. 
This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If 
you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not 
for it, a second way is to give up the Union. I 
am against this. Are you for it? If so you 
should say so plainly.'' He then pointed out 
that the third method, a "compromise," was im- 
possible because "no paper compromise" could 
"affect the (enemy's) army" and it was this 
army, this military strength of the enemiy, which 
dominated the situation and which could not be 
affected by any "convention" of "peace men" — 
because nothing that such a peace convention 
could do would "keep (the enemy's) army out of 
Pennsylvania." The professional pacifists, the 
neo-copperheads of to-day, must either repudiate 
Lincoln or accept these words as their own con- 
demnation. Make the terms as general as the 

94 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

truth they express, thereby applying them to 
any just war; and Lincoln says that he is op- 
posed to the surrender of vital national rights, 
that he believes in maintaining these rights b 
force of arms, that peace (for which he so 
earnestly prayed) can be obtained only by 
armed strength backing right, and that no 
action by any "convention of peace men" can 
keep a European army out of New York or an 
Asiatic army out of San Francisco. 

He is just as explicit in upholding the prin- 
ciple of obligatory universal military service 
(the draft) as compared with purely voluntary 
service. He of course heartily approved the 
volunteers who volunteered to fight, and he used 
them with efficiency during the first years of the 
war — for otherwise the war would have been 
lost. But he had no patience with the volunteers 
who volunteered to stay at home, and when 
these became too numerous he refused to 
''waste time" by further "experimenting" with 
the "volunteer system" which had been shown 
to be "inadequate." He wrote that the 
men who had refused to volunteer should now 
be subject to "the principle of . . . involun- 
tary or enforced service," so as to make them 
do what their "manly brethren" had already 
done; saying of the latter: "Their toil and 
blood has been given as much for you as for 

95 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

themselves. Shall it all be lost rather than that 
you, too, will bear your part? . . . The prin- 
ciple of enforced service (has) been used in 
establishing our independence . . . shall we 
shrink from the necessary means to maintain 
our free Government, which our grandfathers 
employed to establish it and our own fathers 
have already employed once to maintain it? 
Are we degenerate? Has the manhood of our 
race run out?" 

One of Washington's earliest acts as Presi- 
dent was to submit to Congress a plan for uni- 
versal obligatory military training and service; 
and all those who now oppose such a plan de- 
serve the scorn which Lincoln expressed for the 
men who opposed the plan in his day. The 
men who were too proud to fight he dismissed 
as degenerates, whose manhood had run out. 
To those who desired peace without victory 
he answered that in order to secure a just and 
lasting peace he would if necessary continue 
the war until all the wealth piled up by the 
bondsman's two hundred years of unre- 
quited toil should be sunk and until every drop 
of blood drawn by the lash had been paid by 
another drawn with the sword. 

In Lincoln's time wise radicals treated the 
preservation of the Union and the destruction 
of slavery as paramount over and precedent to 

96 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 



all questions of social and individual better- 
ment; exactly as wise radicals to-day treat the 
questions of Americanism — true Nationalism — 
and thoroughgoing preparedness for defense as 
dwarfing all others. But incidentally Lincoln 
expressed himself now and then on these social 
and industrial questions, and always in a spirit 
of sane but thoroughgoing and intense de- 
m_ocracy. He as emphatically stated that the 
people were "the rightful masters of both con- 
[ gresses and courts" as any Progressive of 1912; 
and, in like spirit, he showed that this attitude 
was accompanied by entire respect for the 
courts and their authority. But it is as regards 
human rights and property rights, the rights 
of labor and the rights of capital, that his ex- 
ample is especially instructive. 

In 1859 Lincoln announced as the true doc- 
trine that ''the rights of property'' are secondary 
to the "personal rights of men," and that he 
was "for both the man and the dollar, but in 
case of conflict, the man before the dollar"; 
and he added the pregnant sentence: "He who 
would be no slave must consent to have no 
slave. Those who deny freedom to others de- 
serve it not for themselves." This applied to 
black slavery then. It applies now to any 
wealthy corporation which fails to respect and 
preserve and encourage all the manhood rights 

97 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

of its workers and to treat them as partners; 
and it no less applies to any powerful labor 
union which shows brutality or insolent disre- 
gard for equity in dealing with the rights of any 
of our citizens. 

Lincoln had a seriously thought-out philos- 
ophy about the rights of capital and the rights 
of labor, which he developed before he was 
President, and to which he held throughout his 
Presidency. In 1859 and i860 he formulated 
these views on several occasions. His radi- 
calism had not a touch of Marxian socialism. 
He repeatedly and explicitly approved of pro- 
tection for capital, and insisted that a "certain 
relation'' between it and labor "rightfully ex- 
isted.'' His words were: "That men who are 
industrious and sober and honest in the pursuit 
of their own interests should after a while ac- 
cumulate capital, and also if they should choose 
when they have accumulated it, to use it to save 
themselves from actual labor, and hire other 
people to labor for them, is right," and again: 
"It is best for all to leave each man free to 
acquire property as fast as he can. Some will 
get wealthy. I do not believe in a law to pre- 
vent men from getting rich; it would do more 
harm than good. So while we do not propose 
any war upon capital we do wish to allow the 
humblest man an equal chance to get rich with 

98 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

every one else." But he regarded the laboring 
man as the normal man and the interests of 
labor as supreme, saying: "Labor is prior to 
and independent of capital; labor can exist with- 
out capital, but capital could never have existed 
without labor. Labor is the superior — greatly 
the superior — of capital." In line with this 
view he declares that: "Henceforth educated 
people must labor. Otherwise education itself 
would become an intolerable evil"; and he 
especially holds up to admiration a community of 
highly skilled, educated, soil-tillers, able each 
of them to derive a comfortable subsistence from 
his own intelligent, thorough work in the in- 
tensive cultivation of a small farm. "Such a 
community," says Lincoln, "will be alike inde- 
pendent of crowned kings, money kings, and 
land kings." 

When he became President his convictions if 
anything strengthened. In his view, as he ex- 
pressed it in his special message to Congress on 
July 4, 1861, the war was "essentially a people's 
contest . . . (for) the rights of men and the 
authority of the people ... for maintaining 
in the world that form and substance of gov- 
ernment whose leading object is to elevate the 
condition of men — to lift artificial weights from 
all shoulders; to clear the paths of lawful pur- 
suit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and 

.99 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

a fair chance in the race of Hfe.'' Five months 
later, in his regular message to Congress, he 
repeated what he had said before he was Presi- 
dent: "Labor is prior to and independent of 
capital. Labor is the superior of capital and 
deserves much the higher consideration. Capi- 
tal has its rights, which are as worthy of pro- 
tection as any other rights.'' He continued by 
stating that "there is, and probably always will 
be, a relation between labor and capital pro- 
ducing mutual benefits"; but insisted that there 
were only a few capitalists, and a few men who 
labored for capitalists, but that the large ma- 
jority of the people neither worked for others 
nor had others working for them — a statement 
not even then as broadly true as he made it, 
and much less so now; and he went on to praise 
"the just, generous and prosperous system 
which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, 
and consequent energy and progress and im- 
provement of condition to all," and he then 
singled out for special praise "those who toil up 
from poverty" as eminently disinclined "to take 
or touch aught which they have not honestly 
earned" — a statement certainly more sweeping 
than is warranted by our subsequent experience 
with strong, self-made men. On March 21, 
1864, in a reply to a committee of workingmen, 
he read this part of his message to Congress of 

100 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

December, 1861, and added a few sentences run- 
ning in part as follows: "The strongest bond 
of human sympathy, outside of the family re- 
lation, should be one uniting all working people, 
of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds. Nor 
should this lead to a war upon property or upon 
the owners of property. Property is the fruit 
of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good 
in the world . . . Let not him who is house- 
less pull down the house of another, but let him 
work diligently and build one for himself, thus 
by example assuring that his own shall be safe 
from violence when built." 

These are the expressions of a man who held 
to the creed of democracy with fervent intensity 
of conviction and yet who never tried to apply 
his creed either with the rancor of the fanatic 
or with the experience-proof zeal of the doc- 
trinaire. The kind of democracy with which 
Lincoln was familiar was the democracy of a 
farming country where the conditions were akin 
to those of pioneer days, and of "cities'' which 
were hustling, overgrown villages, where there 
was little stratification of either the raw social 
or the raw industrial life. In consequence what 
he says has no direct bearing in detail on a 
community life of great capitalists and masses 
of wage workers, where the social conditions are 
far more static than in the early decades of the 

iQi 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

statehood of Illinois. His experience on the 
prairies had not enabled him to think out either 
the indispensable necessity of capitalism in great 
industrial achievements, or the need of a com- 
plex system of safeguards for labor under the 
very conditions necessary for such achievements. 
But the principles apply; and he carefully 
guarded his statements, so that they should not 
be too sweeping. Of course his words must be 
interpreted by his deeds — for example, his ad- 
vocacy of the spirit of international brother- 
hood among workingmen must be read in the 
light of the fact that at the time he was strain- 
ing every nerve to make the people submit to 
the most colossal sacrifices in order to secure 
the perpetuation of the national life — for Lin- 
coln's life teaches us nothing more clearly than 
that international duty can be performed only 
as the sequence to the fullest insistence upon 
an intense spirit of nationalism. 

Lincoln's belief in the superiority of the rights 
of labor to those of capital was expressed again 
and again ; before he became President, in an 
official message to Congress while he was Presi- 
dent, and again after he had been three years 
President. Evidently it was his deeply held be- 
lief. Surely the perpetuity of our institutions, 
even of our civilization, depends upon our hold- 
ing and acting on the same view. We must 

102 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

shape our governmental policy primarily with 
a view to the welfare of the workingman and 
the farmer. Lincoln's words give us no hint of 
the details of the course we should follow; but 
they do clearly indicate that course. 

But Lincoln also stood for the rights of capi- 
tal; and here again we should follow his policy. 
If the laboring man permits himself to put im- 
proper burdens on capital, he will bring every- 
thing down with a crash; and even if the man 
higher up is smashed, this will be small com- 
fort to the man lower down if he, too, is under 
the ruins. Lincoln explicitly disclaimed any 
hostility to a man because he was wealthy. He 
explicitly asserted that the accumulation of in- 
dividual property was "right, and for the gen- 
eral good." He held up as the proper ideal, not 
burning down the house of another, but build- 
ing up a house for oneself — a corollary to which 
is that it is better for the owner of a small house 
that another man should have a big house, 
rather than that neither should have any house. 
In other words, he believed in a constructive 
system which, while guarding the rights of 
capital, should see that the benefits were as 
widely diffused as possible and that all artificial 
obstacles to a fair start in the world, and to in- 
dustrial democracy, were done away with. 
Finally, it is evident that, although he neither 

J03 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

used modern terminology nor was familiar with 
modern industry, his ideal was a cooperative 
system in which each man labored and each 
man was to some extent an owner of the capital 
necessary for the work. 

In order to live up to the spirit of Lincoln's 
teaching in this matter, it is necessary that we 
refuse to be bound by the letter, which is not ap- 
plicable to an industrial world where capital is 
used in huge masses, mostly corporate, while 
labor is helpless unless it combines. In Lincoln's 
simple world capital was of far smaller im- 
portance than where gigantic, complex, highly 
useful undertakings have either to be financed 
on a huge scale or else left undone; and labor 
was far more fit to maintain its rights under a 
system of primitive individualism. In that 
simple world Lincoln saw only a few men as 
employers, and a few others as employed wage 
workers, while the majority were owners of the 
tools with which or on which they worked. 
What he upheld as a desirable principle was 
that the average man — who can never be the 
man of large means — should himself own a 
piece of the world and do his own work as re- 
gards that piece of the world. What he saw 
has changed. What he upheld as the desirable 
principle has not changed. The individualism 
of Lincoln's section in Lincoln's day has van- 

104 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

ished and cannot be restored. At present the 
mass of people engaged in industry cannot be- 
come owners as individuals; and to give this 
mass a nominal ownership which does not imply 
control fails to reach the heart of the matter 
for control is the element which implies equality 
between men. But no man is fit for control who 
does not possess intelligence, self-respect, and 
respect for the just rights of others. Therefore, 
instead of individual control of industry, there 
must to-day be some species of collective control 
of industry; which means that the tool users 
shall become the tool owners; but which also 
means that they will assuredly break down them- 
selves and their business unless they are willing 
to pay for skilled management a price, in some 
measure, corresponding to the high value of the 
service rendered, and unless they are willing to 
give a just reward to whatever necessary capi- 
tal they cannot themselves supply. This means 
an effort toward a combination of the proper 
functions of the corporation with the wise activi- 
ties of the labor union (and I emphasize proper 
in one case and wise in the other). It is the 
negation of the L W. W. theories and practices. 
From the standpoint of Lincoln's teachings and 
practices, those of the I. W. W. are harmful 
and wrong. But most certainly any fair treat- 
ment of any development of his theories points 

105 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

to progress, step by step, in the direction of 
securing a share of the control of the big cor- 
poration in the hands of the men who work for 
the corporation, but who ought not to remain 
merely the wage-earning employees of the cor- 
poration. This means some adaptation of co- 
operative ownership and management. Lin- 
coln's teachings, applied to the facts of to-day, 
mean that if alive now he would lead toward a 
working combination of collective control and 
liberty, just as he once led toward a working 
combination of individual control and liberty. 
He would lead toward practical idealism in in- 
dustry now exactly as he actually did lead toward 
practical idealism in government; and he would 
have been measurably successful precisely be- 
cause he would never have forgotten that in- 
dustry, like government, must be made a going 
concern. 

In Lincoln's day, as in our day, there were 
wise men and foolish men, good men and evil 
men, both among those who called themselves 
conservatives and among those who called them- 
selves radicals; and sometimes emphasis had to 
be placed on the need of daring, and sometimes 
on the need of caution. It was the radicals who 
were most interested in the destruction of 
slavery; and in this the radicals were right; and 
although Lincoln held them back, and steadied 

1 06 



WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 

them and waited until the fullness of time, yet 
in the end he led them to victory. But on the 
whole the radicals put the destruction of slavery 
above the preservation of the Union, and herein 
they were wrong; and the conservatives took 
the reverse view, and herein they were right, 
and Lincoln sided with them; and in the end 
they followed him when he saw that it was best 
to make one cause both of freeing the slave and 
of saving the nation. From all his record it is 
safe to say that if Lincoln had lived to deal with 
our complicated social and industrial problems 
he would have furnished a wisely conservative 
leadership; but he would have led in the radical 
direction. 



107 



CHAPTER V 

A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

'' I ^HERE has been much talk about compul- 
sory arbitration, on either the Canadian or 
New Zealand models, as a method of hereafter 
averting the danger which it is alleged menaced 
us at the time of the threatened railway strike 
in the summer of 191 6. As a matter of fact, 
that threatened danger was due entirely to the 
character of the men we had in public office, 
and to their actions in view of the pending 
political campaign, and no plan will ever per- 
mit us to escape such danger as long as we 
have such public servants. I doubt the possi- 
bility of any mere law eliminating the chance of 
trouble in a great strike. I doubt even more 
strongly whether a law modeled on the Canadian 
or New Zealand plans will have this effect. But 
I think something can be done to lessen the 
danger of strikes, and to give us a far better 
chance, than at present, of averting them, and 
of dealing wisely with them if they come. 

Before considering the plan, it is necessary 
that we get clearly into our heads two facts as 

108 



A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

to which our people are apt to be a little misty — 
the wage workers being especially misty about 
one, and the capitalists about the other. 

In the first place it should be accepted as axio- 
matic that the country will never resort to any 
policy aimed at reducing the effectiveness of 
the police power, or at preventing it from be- 
coming more effective. This is a point, which 
I am sorry to say, the labor unions need 
specially to remember. It is both regrettable 
and discreditable that they should so often 
antagonize efficiency in the police force. It is 
regrettable and discreditable for example, that 
they should oppose the Pennsylvania State Con- 
stabulary System, and should object to its being 
introduced in New York or Colorado. There 
can be no possible justification for such oppo- 
sition; and it speaks ill for any person who be- 
comes a party thereto. There is every possible 
reason for seeing that the efficiency of the 
police is not impaired, for such impairment is 
always at the expense of law-abiding and up- 
right men, whether rich or poor. There can 
be no possible justification for seeking to impair 
this efficiency. If the police power is used op- 
pressively, or improperly, let us by all means 
put a stop to the practice and punish those re- 
sponsible for it; but let us remember that a 
brute will be just as much of a brute whether 

109 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

he is inefficient or efficient. Either abolish the 
police, or keep them at the highest point of 
efficiency. To follow any other course is foolish. 
A bad man in a uniform may perhaps use his 
weapon to evil purpose; but it would be childish 
because of this fact to insist that all policemen, 
instead of having automatic revolvers, be armed 
with flintlock pistols. We must give the in- 
dividual policeman the best arms possible, in 
order that he may not be at a disadvantage when 
pitted against a criminal; and then see to it that 
under no circumstances are these arms used 
unless the need is imperative, and the justifica- 
tion complete. Exactly the same rule applies 
as regards the efficiency of the police force as 
a whole. 

But while this feeling against the police is 
entirely improper, it is perfectly natural; be- 
cause in labor disturbances the action of the 
police, when it has been called out, in nineteen- 
twentieths of the cases is against the interest of 
the wrong-doing wage worker, arid not against 
the interest of the wrong-doing capitalist. The 
wage worker is right in resenting this fact. But 
he is wholly wrong in failing to see where the 
iroublj comes in. He makes his attack on the 
vviong point. The trouble is not that the Gov- 
ernment represses the wrong-doing of one side. 
The trouble is that it does not also repress the 

no 



A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

wrong-doing of the other side. The protest 
should be not against the efficient use of the 
poHce power but against the failure to use it 
with equal efficiency against both sides. The 
trouble is not in the use of the police force to 
restore order. No Government has any warrant 
for existing, if it cannot keep order, and sup- 
press disorder and violence. This is the first 
step to take and until it has been taken all 
further progress is impossible. The trouble is 
that the Government is apt to confine itself to 
keeping order, whereas it ought by rights to 
treat keeping order, not as in itself an end, but 
as a means for securing justice. The old-style 
Bourbon capitalist was fond of insisting that the 
Government should do nothing except keep 
order; that it was its highest duty by force to 
interfere with violence, which was the weapon 
of the misguided or criminal wage worker, but 
that it was an abhorrent wrong for it to inter- 
fere with the greed, cunning, trickery, and ruth- 
less indifference to the welfare of others, which 
were shown not only by evil capitalists, but by 
many well-meaning capitalists who simply did 
not think and did not possess foresight and 
vision. In so far as this view still prevails, it 
is evident that the police power of the Govern- 
ment is a power exercised only in the interest 
of the capitalists. But where Government 

III 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

exerts in favor of one class a power vital to 
the welfare of that class, it has the right to lay 
down conditions which must be complied with 
by that class in order to warrant the exercise of 
the power. Those who invoke governmental aid 
must submit to governmental regulation. 

As a matter of fact, while the tasks of secur- 
ing justice from the wage worker to the capi- 
talist and from the capitalist to the wage worker 
differ widely as regards the ease of execution, 
they are morally on the same level of justi- 
fiability and necessity. For example, the dis- 
turbances in connection with a mining company 
in one of the Rocky Mountain States in 19 14 
reached a pitch that made it necessary for the 
army of the United States to go into the state. 
It was entirely proper to send the army into the 
state. It was entirely proper to deal as sternly 
as was necessary with riot and murder ; for who- 
ever condones riot and murder is an enemy of 
the commonwealth. But when once the United 
States Government had sent the regular army of 
the United States into the state in question, to 
put a stop to violence which was wholly or 
partially due to the conditions of work and 
living created by the action of the mining com- 
pany, it was clearly the duty of the Gov- 
ernment also to step in and deal with the con- 
ditions which called forth the violence. In other 

112 



A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

words, the Government should have dealt impar- 
tially with the wrong-doing by both sides — and 
there can be no question of the gravity of some 
of the wrong-doing by each side. The Govern- 
ment should have insisted upon its right, and 
its duty, to take action so thoroughgoing as to 
remedy both the immediate and the ultimate 
wrongs done by both sides, and to guarantee 
straight and clean dealing by both sides for the 
future. As a matter of fact, the Washington 
authorities did nothing to remedy the conditions 
which had produced the outbreak of homicidal 
anarchy; they took no steps to guarantee that 
justice should come as the sequel to establishing 
law and order. 

Any one with any knowledge of labor trou- 
bles can point to instance after instance during 
the last few years where the fault has lain 
almost wholly with the labor men, and also to 
instance after instance in which the fault has 
lain almost wholly with the capitalists. The 
man is a thoroughly bad public servant who de- 
clines to face the truth as regards either set of 
cases. Many employers, individual and cor- 
porate, have been shamelessly and brutally arro- 
gant toward labor, and the Government should 
fearlessly interfere against them. But many 
employers have learned wisdom which makes 
them, in a sense, rival the unions by sedulously 

113 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

providing for the workers the very things the 
unions demand (sometimes to the chagrin, in- 
stead of the pleasure, of the mere agitators 
among the labor leaders) ; and where this is 
the case the Government should in its actions 
recognize the fact just as fearlessly as it recog- 
nizes the opposite fact when the conditions are 
reversed. 

Where, as in the case above referred to, the 
company is not only the man's employer, but the 
man's landlord, and owns the streets and 
public buildings of the town in which he 
lives as well as the land on which he works, 
and controls absolutely the public officials, the 
condition of affairs created is one which not 
merely justifies but requires the interference of 
the Government. The Government should in- 
terfere in such manner as to encourage and not 
harm the business in so far as the business is 
carried on with just regard for the rights of 
the wage workers as well as for the rights of 
the general public; but in addition to encourag- 
ing the business it should also control it and see 
that the rights both of the wage workers and 
the public are really conserved. In the case in 
question the soldiers wearing Uncle Sam's uni- 
form did well, as usual. They were for many 
months supreme in their control of the situation 
in so far as their powers were permitted to ex- 

114 



A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

tend. They not only put a stop to all excesses by 
the strikers and by the armed employees of the 
operators, but they also very wisely prohibited all 
organized importation of strike-breakers from 
other localities. The Federal Government, how- 
ever, took no efficient steps to secure a just and 
permanent solution of the difficulties; and the 
withdrawal of the army left conditions precisely 
as they formerly were. This was not right. The 
Federal Government should in all such cases un- 
hesitatingly interfere to police disorder; but it 
ought not to rest content with this. It should also 
pohce the causes of disorder. It is necessary first 
to deal with the dreadful situation caused by the 
results up to which these causes have led ; but the 
only final solution is to deal with the causes them- 
selves. If the State will not deal with them, and 
if it nevertheless takes the view that the Federal 
Government is bound to interfere in order to 
enforce the law which the State is powerless 
to enforce, then the Federal Government should 
be given and should assume, as a necessary 
corrollary to its power of intervention to re- 
store order, the further power to establish the 
reign of justice in such manner as to prevent 
a recurrence of the causes which inevitably lead 
to disorder. There must somewhere be govern- 
mental power to deal with both sides. Violence 
must be vigorously repressed ; but the law must 

115 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

be enforced by lawful methods. This means 
that the Government must supply the police, and 
must not only eliminate the mob on one side, 
but must eliminate on the other the private mine- 
guard and imported thug. Moreover, the police 
power should always be exercised in conjunction 
with a thoroughgoing and impartial govern- 
mental inquiry into the causes of the strike; 
and until this Government commission has had 
time to investigate the facts and make its 
findings, it would be wise to forbid the import- 
ing of strike-breakers — for the imported strike- 
breaker stands on an entirely different footing 
from the non-unionist (or unionist) who refuses 
to go on strike. 

In any labor disturbance of a size or charac- 
ter to jeopardize the public welfare, there are 
three parties in interest — the property owners, 
the wage earners, and the general public. I 
refuse to assent to the view that either the 
owners of the property, or the workers, have 
interests paramount to the general interest of 
the public at large. This position was formerly 
taken by the owners, who insisted that the 
property was theirs, and that the Government 
had nothing whatever to do with their manage- 
ment of it, except to furnish them protection 
if they were threatened by lawless violence on 
the part of the workers. I then declined to ac- 

ii6 



A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

cept this view. In exactly the same way I now 
decHne to accept any claim put forth in their 
turn by the workers that they must not be in- 
terfered with by the Government, and that the 
public has no rights which it can assert — as 
against the will of the workers — to do whatever 
they choose in the premises. One view is pre- 
cisely as untenable as the other. The public 
servant who is worth his salt, will do what is 
right, no matter which side is hurt, and will pay 
no heed to the threats of either side when the 
question is one affecting the public interests. 

Having in view the considerations above set 
forth, it seems to me that the following course 
should be adopted by the nation in dealing with 
those exceptional labor disturbances where the 
national as distinct from merely local welfare is 
menaced, and where the national interest is so 
greatly involved that the custodians of the 
greater welfare are not warranted in refraining 
from action. In such cases the representatives 
of the Government should thoroughly investigate 
all the facts, and all the claims advanced by 
both sides, and decide exactly what the rights 
and wrongs are, and what ought to be done in 
the premises — deciding for instance, if neces- 
sary, any such question as what ought to be the 
proper maximum hours for labor, or minimum 
rates of wage, or conditions of labor, or methods 

117 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

for safe-guarding lives, or, in short, any or all 
the questions at issue. They should then make 
an award which will be binding upon the capi- 
talists, the property owners. The award would 
be in the nature of a decree. The Government 
would see that the terms were strictly complied 
with; failure to comply would mean that the 
Government itself would take hold and run the 
business until the orders were carried out. The 
Government would not say that the wage 
earners would have to return to work on the 
conditions laid down. It would not interfere 
with the right of the wage earners to strike, or 
by entirely peaceful methods endeavor to dis- 
suade other men from taking their places. But, 
if the employers, or capitalists, carried out fully, 
and in good faith, the Government's directions, 
the Government would guarantee, by the exer- 
tion of the entire police power of the nation, 
that there should be no violence against them, 
no lawless interference with their running the 
business according to the terms laid down. 

Many men, who do not think out the matter, 
will doubtless feel at first glance that such a 
system would bear more heavily against the 
capitalist than against the laborer. Such is not 
really the fact. On the contrary, the method 
would work substantial justice to both sides. 
It is the capitalists who need the protection of 

ii8 



A SQUARE DEAL IN LAW ENFORCEMENT 

the police power, and who cannot exist without 
such protection. There are, of course, excep- 
tional instances (under conditions such as ex- 
isted in connection with some of the Rocky 
Mountain Mining Companies), where there is 
also violence on the part of the capitalists by the 
use of hired fighters; and in this case the gov- 
ernmental police power would be used promptly 
to suppress violence on both sides. But vio- 
lence by capitalists through the use of fighting 
mercenaries is exceptional. Ordinarily, the mis- 
deeds committed by the employers against the 
laborers are not of a character that can in any 
way be afifected by the armed force of the Gov- 
ernment. This force therefore is called out only 
to help one side in the dispute. It is emphatically 
proper that it should give this help, and that it 
should put a stop to any misdeeds of the other 
side. But it is no less emphatically proper that 
at the same time the Government, which thus 
furnishes protection to property against the law- 
less violence of labor, should also, just as ef- 
fectively, deal with any wrongs committed by 
the owners of the capital, or property, at the 
expense of labor. 

In short, it is the business of the Government 
to find out the causes that have resulted in the 
outbreak and see just where wrong has been 
done. If the wrong has been committed by the 

119 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

capitalists, it must correct this wrong. Then, 
having acted on behalf of the rights of the 
workers, and inasmuch as the capitalists have 
complied with its orders, the Government must 
in turn furnish full protection to them in their 
rights, by guaranteeing them against any form 
of lawless disorder and violence. 



120 



CHAPTER VI 

INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE; THE TOOL-OWNER AND THE 

TOOL-USER 

\\TE. have failed lamentably to prepare for 
this war during the two and a half 
years of peace contemptuously granted us 
after Germany began the war. Let us re- 
frain from aggravating our folly by now fail- 
ing to prepare for the tremendous industrial 
problems which will come to the forefront as 
soon as peace arrives. One of the greatest and 
most pressing of these is that which is con- 
cerned with the relations between labor and 
capital, and the relations of both to the public. 
The immediate exigencies of the war have 
been met at Washington with confusion and 
absence of coherent plan. At the moment the 
Government has partially waked to the 
need, and has summoned the big business 
leaders of the country to its aid; and on the 
whole they have responded with both patriotism 
and efficiency. Yet the Government for many 
months seemed equally afraid to refuse their aid 
and to treat them well. It wished to pay less than 
a proper profit on their work for the Government ; 

121 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

and yet was not prepared to tax with proper 
heaviness the excess profits when they became of 
huge dimensions. The Sherman Law, which for 
nearly a decade had caused more damage than 
good, because of the refusal of Congress to 
amend it into proper shape, has, for the time 
being, practically been suspended; the Govern- 
ment is encouraging business men in certain lines 
of business to get together, pool their purchases, 
fix prices, adopt a common sales policy; in short 
to do the very things forbidden by the Sherman 
Law. We thus see one department of the Govern- 
ment asking business men in certain lines to 
do the very thing for which the Department of 
Justice has the same men under anti-trust in- 
dictments. If the Sherman Law hurts our pro- 
duction and business efficiency in war time, it 
hurts it also in peace time, for the problems of 
boring for oil, of producing steel, manufactur- 
ing and selling agricultural implements, are no 
different now from what they were six months 
ago. Instead of having the Administration con- 
nive at breaking the law at this time, the law 
should be amended so as to make it unnecessary 
to break it at any time — along the lines of seeing 
that business is both encouraged and controlled. 
Big work can only be done by big business; 
and Government must courageously but in- 
telligently control big business. 

122 



INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

In this present crisis the right course to 
follow is to guarantee the business man 
who works for the Government a good profit; 
then to put a heavy progressive tax on all 
the excess profits above this. See that labor is 
paid a first-class wage; and then that it gives 
first-class work for the first-class wage. Exempt 
plain food and plain clothing, and all the necessi- 
ties for a simple life and family rearing from 
taxation.- Let incomes bear substantial pro- 
gressive taxes; but not on the basis of class 
envy; and initiate a national policy of heavy 
progressive inheritance taxes. 

So much for the immediate needs of the mo- 
ment. Let us meet them instantly; and let us 
furthermore begin to secure industrial justice — 
the square deal— for the future. The first es- 
sential is to rid ourselves of the cant and hypo- 
crisy of those who, usually for improper political 
reasons, seek to persuade people that large- 
scale business concerns, including the so-called 
trusts, owe their growth to the tariff, or to gov- 
ernmental corruption, and should be destroyed— 
not controlled in the public interests. The 
politicians who take this attitude work nothing 

but mischief. 

Unlimited cutthroat competition between small 
and weak concerns is not now possible; and, if 
possible, it would be wholly undesirable, People 

123 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

have said that the tariff causes trusts. It does 
nothing of the sort. The Sugar Trust, for ex- 
ample, has not been harmed in the smallest de- 
gree by the removal of the tariff on sugar, al- 
though multitudes of small producers have been 
ruined. The Standard Oil Corporation was 
wholly unaffected by the tariff (and breaking it 
into small corporations under the Sherman Law 
merely resulted in the oil costing more to the 
consumer, in the men on the inside making 
enormous fortunes, and in the reduction of the 
efficiency of the concern in international busi- 
ness). The unscientific lowering of the tariff has 
not harmed the trusts in the smallest degree save 
as an incident of harming the entire business 
world. People have said that governmental cor- 
ruption has favored trusts, that they have been 
built up by rebates and the like. Unquestionably 
some trusts have been favored improperly by cer- 
tain governmental bodies; and others have been 
built up by improper practices. But, speaking of 
the business world as a whole, these are not the 
prime causes and are hardly even considerable 
factors in the growth of big corporations. They 
are responsible for some of the evil that has ac- 
companied the growth; and to suppress them 
there must be efficient governmental control. 
But the simple fact is that modern big corpora- 
tions are due primarily to three causes, namely, 

124 



INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

steam transportation, the electric telegraph, and 
the telephone. No change in the tariff will stop 
the upgrowth of big corporations. No moral 
reform in the world of business or the world 
of politics will stop it. But big corporations 
could be ended to-morrow by the abandonment 
of the railway, the telegraph and the telephone. 
The trouble is that the price would be somewhat 
heavy ! 

This is an era of combination. Big business 
has come to stay. It cannot be put an end to; 
and if it could be put an end to, it would mean 
the most widespread disaster to the community. 
The proper thing to do is to socialize it, to 
moralize it, to make it more an agent for social 
good and to do away with everything in it that 
tends toward social evil. To do this there must 
be a wise governmental control, a governmental 
control that will check the corporation when it 
is doing wrong and check the labor union when 
it is doing wrong, and hold each accountable 
and responsible for its deeds and misdeeds, but 
which shall at the same time recognize that the 
corporation has its rights just as the union has 
its rights, and that each is to be encouraged as 
long as it does well. No great industrial well- 
being can come unless big business prospers. 
China is the home of the small industrial unit, 
and the Chinese laborer is badly off. Persons 

125 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

who inveigh against capital as the source of all 
troubles of labor should ponder the fact that 
over large and densely populated areas in China, 
there are no capitalists and no capital; and that 
in these areas the laborers are steeped in the 
most abject poverty. We cannot hold our own 
with foreign competition, we cannot lead in de- 
veloping South America, without successful big 
business concerns. 

Over a century ago the "industrial revolution" 
began to turn the industrial world into one of 
big business, in which the dominant features 
were massed capital on a hitherto unheard-of 
scale, and laborers employed, also in enormous 
masses, by the capitalist, without personal 
touch or sense of responsibility on his part. The 
new system was inaugurated in England. 
France and Germany speedily followed suit. In 
the United States, the change from the old 
system of unlimited cutthroat competition among 
a multitude of small, weak concerns, to the new 
system of concentration (without either co- 
operation or control), got under full headway 
about the time of the Civil War ; in economically 
backward countries like Russia and Spain it was 
yet later. 

There was much that was beneficial in the 
change. It produced an immense increase of 
population and aggregate wealth; it was every- 

126 



INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

where accompanied or followed by a great 
spread of education and community effort; and 
it probably, on the whole, raised the standard of 
attainable luxury and comfort for the workers 
in the industrial countries, compared to what 
it remained in the backward countries such as 
Spain and Russia. 

But it was accompanied by evils so numerous 
and so grave that to this day one of our heaviest 
tasks is the struggle to do away with them. The 
movement substituted for the old social contrast 
between privileged patrician and unprivileged 
plebeian an even more offensive and violent in- 
dustrial contrast between the man of one type 
of specialized capacity who possessed capital 
and the men of all other types of capacity who 
did not possess capital. Under the stimulus of 
the economic individualism taught by writers 
of the school of Adam Smith, the social and ad- 
ministrative nihilism taught by philosophers 
like Herbert Spencer, and the ultra political in- 
dividualism taught by liberal political leaders 
like Thomas Jefferson and Richard Cobden, 
each man was impressed with the belief that the 
selfish seeking of his own interest represented 
substantially his whole duty to the state. The 
revolt against these doctrines showed itself in 
such teachings as those of Marx and such prac- 
tises as those of the Paris Commune; and these 

127 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

abstract and concrete applications of the theory 
of ultra-collectivism naturally reacted in favor 
of the apostles of ultra-individualism. 

Here in America we have in many ways been 
more backward than in most countries of middle 
and western Europe, because our situation was 
such that we could shut our eyes to unpleasant 
truths and yet temporarily prosper, g But our 
system, or rather no-system, of attempting to 
combine political democracy with industrial 
autocracy, and tempering the evil of the boss 
1 and the machine politician by the evil of the 
I doctrinaire and the demagogue, has now begun 
\ to creak and strain so as to threaten a break- 
down. 

Surely the time has come when we should 
with good nature and practical common sense 
set ourselves to the practical work of solving 
the problem. This means that we must disre- 
gard equally the apostles of ultra-collectivism 
and the doctrinaires of ultra-individualism. It 
also means that we must rebuke with equal 
emphasis the men who can see nothing wrong 
in what is done by capitalists and corporations, 
and the other men who can see nothing wrong 
in what is done by labor leaders and trades 
unions. Moreover, it means that we must not 
permit ourselves to be misled by bitterness con- 
cerning wrong-doing that is past into condoning 

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INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

wrong-doing of the opposite type in the present 
— for this is the road that leads straight down 
to that bottomless pit where the spirits of 
Robespierre and Danton find themselves in the 
company of the high-born tyrants whose bloody 
tyranny they denounced and copied. 

At the outset of the industrial revolution, the 
capitalist, the man whose special ability lay in 
the "money touch," profited hugely and with 
gross injustice. He gained an improperly large 
part of the benefit that should have been shared 
betw^een himself and the inventors and man- 
agers, and almost all of the part that should 
have been shared between himself and his wage- 
workers. He practically applied the theory that 
it was his right, and even his duty, to get from 
his workingmen the largest possible amount of 
labor per man for the smallest possible amount 
of pay. Naturally, such a grossly improper at- 
titude tended to produce among the laborers in 
the unions a no less improper fanaticism in de- 
siring that each man should perform as little 
labor as possible for as much pay as possible. 
In similar fashion, the extreme capitalistic 
tyranny which once treated trades unions as 
illegal and sought to make of the laborer a 
serf was largely responsible for the subsequent 
outbreaks of labor-union tyranny which in cer- 
tain places and at certain times have taken the 

129 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

form of criminal conspiracies against society. 
Arrogant selfishness by a combination of 
capitalists, met by arrogant selfishness by a com- 
bination of workingmen, may be better than the 
reign of unchecked selfishness by either side 
alone ; but it can never be satisfactory, and must 
always be fraught with grave danger to the 
whole social fabric. 

It is profoundly to the disadvantage of the 
commonwealth that laborers shall be worked ^ 
the limit for the lowest wages at which they can 
be obtained. It is also profoundly to the dis- 
advantage of the commonwealth that they shall 
do as little work as possible, and that the 
standard of labor adopted shall be that of the 
least efficient man. We need the highest possible 
standard of efficiency. But we also need the 
highest possible reward for that efficiency, and 
reasonable equity in the distribution of the re- 
ward. Unlimited and unregulated competition 
will not secure either end; and mere rancorous 
warfare against property and efficiency will do 
even less. What is needed is a wise and reso- 
lute effort toward cooperation of a character 
which shall give each worker, so far as possible, 
a certain interest in the capital with which he 
works — that is, which shall give the user of the 
tool some property interest in and control over 
the tool. Together with this should go such 

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INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

control by the Government as shall help in secur- 
ing efficiency in the business and justice both 
as among those in the business and as between 
all of them and outsiders. 

There are several conditions which must be 
met if the problem is to be really solved. The 
first is that our aim must be not to damage suc- 
cessful business, but to insure good conduct in 
business; which means greater fairness in ap- 
portioning the profits among all those engaged 
in the business, and propriety of behavior in the 
business as a whole in its relations to the public. 
We wish to get for the workers, among other 
things, permanency of employment, pensions 
which will permit them to face old age with a 
feeling of dignity and security, insurance against 
accidents and disease, proper working and liv- 
ing conditions, reasonable leisure — all these as 
tending toward enabling the worker to get for 
himself interest and joy in life, and on condition 
that he prove his fitness for partnership, for the 
enjoyment of rights, by the way in which he in 
his turn performs his duties and heartily and 
nobly recognizes his obligation to others. Now, 
of course, it ought to be accepted as an axiomatic 
truth that none of these things can be obtained 
from an unprosperous business; that if profits 
are not existent, all talk of sharing them be- 
comes idle. Yet in practise a great mass of 

131 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

more or less insincere and more or less ignorant 
politicians and demagogues disregard this self- 
evident truth; and the popular feeling roused by 
the misdeeds of many corporations in the past 
and of some corporations in the present spurs 
them to disregard it. Many railroad corpora- 
tions, for instance, a decade or two ago, were 
guilty of shameful practices, and there have 
been one or two conspicuous instances of such 
malpractices of recent years. It was absolutely 
necessary that these misdeeds should be checked 
and punished; this was done; and then too many 
legislative bodies proceeded on the assumption 
that by law railroads could be made to assume 
all kinds of burdens to their employees and the 
public at the same time that their rates were 
cut down so as to leave their margin of profit 
almost nil. There has been both failure to ex- 
ercise sufficient control over railways in stock- 
watering and the like, and over-much burdening 
of them by vexatious legislation passed without 
regard to whether or not the burdens were just 
and necessary. In consequence, there is now 
real difficulty in getting investors to put into the 
railroads the capital necessary for fitting them 
to meet the growing needs of the country. 

Business and labor are different sides of the 
same problem. It is impossible wisely to treat 
either without reference to the interests and 

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INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

duties of the other — and without reference to 
the fact that the interests of the general public, 
the commonwealth, are paramount to both. I 
am not asking for the adoption of an impossible 
ideal. Under Hiram Johnson, the Californian 
governmental authorities have realized with rea- 
sonable success precisely this ideal. 

Another vitally important fact to keep in mind 
is the mischievous folly of the nominally 
progressive, but in reality merely Bourbon, effort 
to turn back the wheels of the modern move- 
ment. The loudest of the professional '^anti- 
trust" leaders of the last decade, those who have 
declaimed against all corporations, have sought 
to treat the size of big business as in itself an 
evil, and have diverted popular attention from 
the necessary work of regulating and controlling 
big corporations to the vain effort to smash and 
break up all big corporations without regard to 
their conduct. This has not only represented 
mere evil and folly; it has represented evil and 
folly of the genuinely reactionary type. It has 
represented the obstinate refusal to face the 
new facts and the new needs. It has represented 
the foolish desire to return to the very practices 
which produced the evils against which these 
men clamor. The politicians and agitators of 
this type have shown themselves as emphatically 
Bourbon and Tory as the worst of the trust mag- 

133 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

nates they have assailed; and have been as mis- 
chievous. 

We must face the fact that big business has 
come to stay, and that it cannot be abolished in 
any great nation under penalty of that nation's 
slipping out of the front place in international 
industrialism. During the quarter of a century 
preceding the present war, England slipped 
back in business leadership compared to Ger- 
many, precisely because in Germany they were 
beginning to do business on a large scale, by 
huge combinations. The vital point was that the 
state when necessary encouraged and at the same 
time supervised and controlled these big combi- 
nations, securing justice and reasonably fair 
treatment among capitalists, managers, salaried 
experts and wage-workers — all of whom had 
some voice in, some control of, at least certain 
parts of their common business. 

In the world of international industry the 
future belongs to the nation which develops 
either the big-scale businesses ; or else the ability 
among small-scale business men, workingmen, 
and farmers, to cooperate, to work together 
and pool their resources for production, distri- 
bution, and the full use of scientific research; or 
else, what is most desirable, develops both types 
of business. The small individualistic business 
cannot compete in any field in which either of 

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INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

the other types flourishes. Therefore, whether 
we like it or not, we must either permit and 
encourage the development of these two types 
or fall behind other nations, as Spain once fell 
behind England and France. Our duty is not 
with futile obstinacy to try to stop the new 
movement, but to guide and control it; to en- 
courage it, and yet to make it subservient to the 
common good. If we face it in this spirit we 
shall speedily find that it is far from represent- 
ing mere evil. On the contrary, it is precisely S 
the strong, wealthy, prosperous business con- | 

cerns which can afford to treat their workingmen I 

as in the interest of the commonwealth it is im- j 

perative that they should be treated. Only — it 
is necessary that the Government shall possess 
such control, shall exercise such supervision, 
over them as to insure the use of their giant and 
prospering strength in the common interest. It 
would be as unwise — even if it were possible — 
to exterminate big corporations as to exterminate 
big labor unions. But it is eminently wise for 
the Government to itself make the people a 
partner of both, to supervise the relations of 
each to the other and of both to the general 
public, and gradually to substitute the principle m 
of cooperation for that of Devil-take-the-hind- 
most. "- 

To make the Government a partner in this 

13s 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

manner is necessary to the wise handling of 
labor difficulties. The worst faults of trades 
unionism to-day are largely, and probably 
mainly, due to past and present misconduct and 
shortcoming by the capitalists, the corporations. 
Trades unionism grew up as an effort to or- 
ganize the resistance of labor to capitalistic ex- 
action; and it has acquired or inherited many 
of the vices against which it warred. Corpora- 
tions and labor unions are alike bound to serve 
the commonwealth. Each must recognize in the 
future its public duty; and this can only come 
as the result of the state becoming the partner 
of both, a partner sincerely anxious to help both, 
but determined that each shall do its duty. Pub- 
lic opinion can do much, and no governmental 
movement can succeed without an intelligent 
and determined public opinion behind it; but 
the prime necessity is governmental action. 
This action must have for its goal the guidance 
of all the men in any business, from the top to 
the bottom, so that they may severally and 
jointly make the best use of their lives, and 
help all of us to make the best use of our com- 
mon national life. Such action will end in mere 
nullity unless it encourages the business and 
helps it to prosper, and therefore welcomes the 
growth — the large-scale growth — which comiCS 
as the result of prosperity; for it is only the 

136 



INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

big, prosperous, nationalized business, backed 
by the Government and in close touch with the 
Government, that can take the long look ahead 
necessary for the really right treatment of labor ; 
that can plan for a use of labor which will bene- 
fit both the community and the worker himself; 
that can bargain with the man on what is 
normally a life-time basis, so that he may be 
thoroughly trained to his job and may know 
that if he does his work well he has ahead of 
him in the end leisure, independence, security 
(and, by the way, this means that the gypsy or 
roving or unsettled type of worker, who never 
stays long in one job, is always, whether the 
fault be his own or his employer's, a detriment 
to business and a detriment to labor). Under 
such conditions there can and will come — 
gradually and by evolution, not revolution — a 
shift in control which will mean that the compe- 
tent workers become partners in the enterprise. 
This partnership must mean not only a sharing 
of profit, but a sharing in the guidance and 
management; and therefore it can only come 
step by step, as the wage workers grow out of 
the narrow envy and jealousy which make so 
many men resent superior ability and strive to 
deny it proper reward. It is not necessary that 
the Van Homes and the Jim Hills of the future 
shall receive the enormous financial reward they 

^7 



inr- 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

have had in the past; but it must be substantial, 
or they will not lead to success the business in 
which the brakemen, switchmen, engineers, fire- 
men will, we hope, ultimately become part 
owners as well as workers. Such leadership is 
absolutely needed by the men below, and it must 
be handsomely paid for — there is no more mis- 
chievous form of privilege than giving equal 
rewards for unequal service, and denying the 
great reward to the great service. But it need 
not be a reward fantastically out of proportion 
to the reward of the men beneath; the difference 
need not be many times greater than the differ- 
ences between the rewards given such men as 
Lincoln, Farragut and Sheridan, and the re- 
wards given the men in the ranks under them — 
and there was not a man in the ranks, worth 
his salt, who felt that this difference was not 
more than justified by the difference between the 
service rendered by the three men named and 
the service rendered by himself. 

This shift in control will help to solve the 
difficulties connected with "scientific manage- 
ment." Such management becomes intolerable 
unless it is exercised under conditions which 
give the wage worker his full share in the bene- 
fits accruing; and this is not permanently possi- 
ble unless the men become more closely asso- 
ciated with the management, so that they may 

138 



INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

take some part in the guidance, even if only by 
acquiescence, after they have become thoroughly 
familiar with the difficulties and have become 
willing to share the responsibilities. 

When the tool user has some ownership in 
and some control over the tool, the matter of 
opposition to labor-saving machinery will largely 
solve itself; for then a substantial part of the 
benefit will come to the workingman, instead of 
having it all come as profit to the capitalist, 
while the workingman may see his job vanish. 

Let me again repeat that industrial democracy 
does not mean handing over the control of mat- 
ters requiring expert knowledge to masses of 
men who lack that knowledge; and therefore it 
does mean that it cannot come until the men in 
the ranks have sufficient self-knowledge and 
self-control to accept and demand expert leader- 
ship as part of the necessary division of labor. 
If democracy, whether in industry or politics, 
refuses to employ experts, it will simply show 
that it is unfit to survive. At the outset, at 
least, the share of the workers in control would 
not be on the business side proper of the man- 
agement, but over the conditions of daily work 
— the essentially human side of the industrial 
process. 

Documentation — the mixture of theorizing 
and paper research — is within reasonable limits 

139 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

good; but experimentation is indispensable. It 
is only by experiments in the actual work of 
business that we shall find the exact methods 
by which, and the exact degree to which, we 
can measurably realize the ideal. For full suc- 
cess, the trial should be made in a business in 
which the workers are of a high type in skill, 
intelligence and character, and are fairly well 
accustomed to act together. The Government 
could well afford to experiment along these lines 
in some of its work. Whenever in private busi- 
ness there is any serious, even although only 
partial, attempt to try for a solution along these 
lines, it should receive our sympathetic atten- 
tion. Let us watch them all with encourage- 
ment and open minds — profit-sharing as in the 
steel corporation, high wages, home building, 
partial cooperative discipline — no matter what 
the method. Let us study each attempt, trying 
especially to look at the results from the workers' 
standpoint, and ready to learn any lesson, no 
matter how unexpected nor how much at 
variance with our preconceived notions. Then, 
as we gather wisdom, let us go cautiously for- 
ward in making the state the guarantor that 
what has been gained for the worker without 
its aid shall not be lost because that aid con- 
tinues to be withheld. 

We must become, to a real degree, our 

140 



INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE 

brother's keeper, if only for the sake of our own 
children; for in the long run this world will not 
be a pleasant living place for our children unless 
it is also a reasonably comfortable living place 
for our brother's children. The great scientist, 
Huxley, was about as far removed from mushy 
sentimentalism as any man could be; he was 
a singularly clear-headed man, free from illu- 
sions, and with a fine fearlessness in facing truth. 
In his capital volume, "Method and Result," he 
lays bare with unsparing hand the folly alike of 
the ultra-individualist and of the ultra-col- 
lectivist. He was utterly intolerant of shams, 
and perhaps especially of the exuberant sham- 
monger who promises the arrival of the mil- 
lenium if mankind will adopt his specific patent 
for the abolition of poverty, or war, or vice, or 
whatever evil may at the moment be most ad- 
vertised. Yet Huxley realized absolutely the 
need of grappling with our social and industrial 
dangers, if our civilization is to endure or to 
deserve to endure. Said he: "If there is no 
hope of a large improvement in the condition 
of the greater part of the human family; if it 
is true that the increase of knowledge, the win- 
ning of a greater dominion over nature, which 
is its consequence, and the wealth which fol- 
lows upon that dominion, are to make no dififer- 
ence in the extent and the intensity of want, 

141 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

with its concomitant physical and moral degra- 
dation, among the masses of the people, I should 
hail the advent of some friendly comet, which 
would sweep the whole affair away, as a de- 
sirable consummation." 

This is a stern truth. Let us keep it steadily 
in mind, and govern our actions accordingly. 



142 



CHAPTER VII 
SOCIAL justice; the brotherly court of 

PHILADELPHIA 

COCIAL justice means the effort to guard 
women and children from evil and brutality, 
and, so far as may be, to secure them against 
grinding misery. It means also the effort to open 
the doors of fair dealing to those men who would 
otherwise find them closed. 

We Americans are only on the threshold of the 
campaign for a better national life. We have 
only begun to consider our duty toward the child; 
to realize that the child-drudge is apt to turn 
into the shiftless grown-up; to realize that the 
child growing up in the streets has first-class op- 
portunities for tending toward criminality; and, 
therefore, that playgrounds may be as necessary 
as schools. We have only begun to realize that 
the child's mother, if wise and duty-performing, 
is the only citizen who deserves even more from 
the state than does the soldier; and that, if in 
need, she is entitled to help from the state, so 
that she may rear and care for her children at 
home. We have only begun to realize that, as 

143 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

regards the father, the man, we must help him 
to help himself; help him to learn the vitally im- 
portant and difficult business of cooperation; 
help him to learn industrial citizenship by begin- 
ning to exercise industrial power; and also 
help him along many different lines by outright 
govermental action — insurance against sickness, 
accident, and undeserved unemployment, pro- 
vision for old age, provision against overwork 
and unsanitary conditions. To this end we shall 
ultimately need a system of nationally fed- 
erated labor exchanges, co-ordinated with the 
schools, so that both the capacity of the pupil and 
the demands of industry may be considered. The 
experiences in the town of Gary, Indiana, have 
shown how much the right kind of industrial edu- 
cation can improve the efficiency and the charac- 
ter of labor. 

Part of the program which includes such 
matters can be achieved by sheer growth of pub- 
lic opinion, and by many individuals, acting 
separately or in non-governmental organiza- 
tions. Part must be secured by wise, moderate, 
steady action through governmental agencies, 
through the agencies that represent the people 
as a whole, that represent all of us. In taking 
such action we must, as always, remember that 
the demagogue is as dangerous a public enemy 
as the corruptionist himself, that the insincere 

144 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

radical is not a whit better than the insincere 
Tory, and that the enthusiastic fool will prob- 
ably work even more mischief than the selfish 
reactionary. All of these men are among the 
foes of our own household! We must also re- 
member that reforms cost money, and therefore 
we cannot go into them save in so far as we have 
the money. Excellent intentions are of no use if 
we cannot pay our debts. If we impose too great 
a tax on any business, whether this tax comes in 
the shape of money directly paid to the Govern- 
ment or of obligations and expenses imposed by 
governmental action, the business cannot pros- 
per and must be abandoned. Therefore, while 
we have a right to require that each man shall 
contribute in proportion to his ability and his 
privilege, and that as to certain forms of taxation 
and obligation there shall be a heavy cumulative 
imposition of duty to go with marked increase in 
fortune, yet we must be scrupulously careful not 
to damage the general prosperity. General pros- 
perity is conditioned mainly upon private 
business prosperity. Such private prosperity, if 
obtained by swindling in any form, represents 
general detriment. But it is essential, in the com- 
mon interest, not to damage legitimate private 
business by either misdirected or over-rapid ac- 
tivity in securing, for the public at large or for 
the less fortunate among our fellows, benefits 

145 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

which ought to be secured but which can only be 
secured if the community as a whole is in a 
strong, healthy and prosperous condition. It is 
essential to pass prosperity around ; but it is mere 
common sense to recognize that unless it exists 
it cannot be passed around. The wage workers 
must get their full share in the general well-be- 
ing; but if there is no general well-being there 
will be no share of it for anybody. 

These are excellent sentiments ! How can they 
be realised, even partially, in actual practice? 
Well, here and there, over the country there are 
various communities and governmental instru- 
mentalities which actually have in certain fields 
measurably achieved the purposes above set 
forth; and to study the practical working of one 
of these — I choose, as an example, the Municipal 
Court of Philadelphia — is worth far more than 
any amount of speculation in vacuo. As engin- 
eers put it, the only, and the final, test of theory 
is the service test. 

The really valuable — the invaluable — reform 
is that which in actual practice works ; and there- 
fore the credit due is overwhelmingly greater as 
regards the men and women actually engaged 
in doing the job, than as regards the other men 
and women who merely agitate the subject or 
write about it — and a single study of a reform 
which is being applied is worth any number of 

146 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

uplift books which are evolved from the re- 
former's inner consciousness. Of course there 
must be agitation in order to get the reform 
started, and there must be some preliminary the- 
oretical studies, and where the object is really 
worth while, the agitation sensible as well as zeal- 
ous, and the studies capable of application, the 
early agitators and writers deserve well of the 
community. But under no circumstances do they 
deserve as well as do the men and women who in 
very fact make the machinery function to advan- 
tage, and who by constant test and trial and ex- 
periment eliminate faults and develop new and 
useful activities. Therefore an institution like 
the Municipal Court of Philadelphia deserves the 
study — and the cordial support — of all who de- 
sire to achieve something definite toward giving 
aid to those who most need it. 

The purposes of the Municipal Court were ad- 
mirably set forth, when it was established, by its 
nine judges in the following statement to the 
public : 

''The civil side of the court will be managed 
to give prompt but equitable justice to creditors 
and debtors, brushing aside the legal crusts, the 
observance of which, while dear to those who 
admire the growth of the law, causes much un- 
necessary delay in settling disputes. The elimin- 
ation of unnecessary technicalities will give a 

147 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

sane and effective settlement of the obligations 
between suitors. 

''The delinquent and criminal side will be 
guarded to reduce the number of complaints by 
bringing together, as far as possible, those es- 
tranged, and to render a trial that will guard the 
right of the individual. We assume the right of 
persons to be equal to, or even paramount to, that 
of property, and, while protecting the one, we 
will strive to save the person to himself and so- 
ciety, recognizing that the value of a nation is 
based on unit life. We will not be theoretical, but 
practical. While dealing on this plane with those 
who should know right from, wrong, we will try 
to save and protect those who may be redeemed, 
and we will utilize the corrective purposes of the 
law upon others whose acts and doings will bene- 
fit society by their absence. 

"We will deal with the juvenile in a manner that 
will correct ills and reduce delinquency by re- 
moving the causes thereof, with the purpose of 
not only correcting the child, but using the child 
to correct the parents and make the home." 

It was my good fortune to pass part of a day 
at the court, watching it in action; and even a 
superficial examination was enough to show how 
well the court was succeeding in its purposes. 

The court has explicitly announced that it 

148 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

will eliminate from its action those legalistic 
technicalities so dear to the legalistic mind, so 
ruinous from the standpoint of justice, and so 
heartbreaking from the standpoint of humanity. 
The court has faithfully kept its promise. The 
court puts the protection of property high — and it 
is emphatically proper in so doing, for full pro- 
tection of property is an essential to civilization ; 
but it puts human rights even higher, laying 
down the rule that its duty is to save the individ- 
ual both for himself and for society. The court 
draws the necessary line against foolish senti- 
mentality with clearness when it says that it will 
endeavor to save and protect those who can be 
redeemed, to remove the causes of youthful de- 
linquency, correct parents, preserve the home, 
and, where possible, reconcile those who are es- 
tranged outside of the court; but that it will use 
the corrective and punitive purposes of the law 
upon those whose segregation from society is 
necessary for the well-being of society. 

This spirit is something wholly different from 
what any court would have shown even a genera- 
tion ago; and it is as remote from the spirit of 
Blackstone as from that of Hammurabi. It rep- 
resents, inasmuch as it has been translated into 
action, that ideal of service which — in spite of the 
way it is often warped, by silly sentimentality as 
much as by selfish materialism — is here and there 

149 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

taking root in our governmental, social, and in- 
dustrial systems. 

While visiting the court I myself saw instance 
after instance of the way in which the court has 
humanized its procedure at the points which most 
concern the average citizen, the man or woman 
who most sadly needs an understanding and sym- 
pathetic justice and to whom mere formal legal- 
ism is a brazen wall, forbidding all access to jus- 
tice. 

In one of the rooms a most charming and 
capable woman presided as a court official — and, 
incidentally, it is nonsense to limit appointments 
of judges of the Municipal Courts exclusively to 
men when there are some women pre-eminently 
fit for the position. She had various women and 
girls as assistants; neatly dressed, attractive — 
pleasant, smiling assistants, with nothing of the 
awful and gloomy solemnity of the professional 
uplifter about them. One of these assistants, 
herself, I think, of Italian parentage, but looking 
like any bright American girl, was dealing with 
two rather forlorn, battered persons, a man and 
a woman, Italian immigrants of the lower labor- 
ing class. They had quarreled bitterly some 
months previously, had separated, and had then 
indulged in mutual recriminations of a type 
which would have made any one not accustomed 
to their habits of thought and expression aban- 

150 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

don all hope or even desire to get them to- 
gether. But the brave and experienced young 
girl who was getting them together possessed 
both an authoritative mind and an understand- 
ing heart. When I appeared the pair had been 
persuaded to "talk things over," each had ad- 
mitted the loneliness caused by the absence of 
the other, and before I left a rather effusive 
reconciliation took place, and the reunited couple 
left court. 

I was much interested, and in response to my 
queries I was told that already, during the court's 
short life, considerably over a thousand similar 
cases had been settled, each being promptly dealt 
with on a basis of common sense and sympathy, 
and each being carefully followed afterward so 
as to secure every opportunity for the settlement 
to be permanent. 

Another branch of the court's work deals with 
small suits for damages and unpaid bills. People 
of means and leisure have no conception of the 
amount of misery due to the causes which lie hid- 
den behind these small suits. They represent in 
the aggregate an extraordinary amount of bitter- 
ness, and they ferment into economic unrest, vio- 
lent social revolt, and much individual crime and 
failure. Organizations such as the admirable 
Legal Aid Society have been created especially 
to deal with them. The Philadelphia Municipal 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

Court settles them on the average in as many 
days as it formerly took months in the ordinary 
courts. As an illustration of the cases dealt 
with, take the following: 

A salesman in a hat store brought suit for a 
week's wages. The defense of his employers was 
that he was not entitled to a full week's wages, 
having been discharged for cause, in that he 
had left their store to take a hat across the street 
to a rival concern to have a small repairing job 
done. That was considered so indiscreet by the 
employers that he was discharged at once, and 
paid only for the days he had worked. The sales- 
man's reply was that he had been instructed by 
his employers not to accept small repair jobs. 
The particular job in question was brought to him 
by an old customer of the store, and the salesman 
thought he would retain the good will of the cus- 
tomer and his continued trade by having the little 
job done at once. The salesman had been with 
the concern for a number of years, which was 
evidence of his reliability and prior good conduct. 
The judge who heard the case suggested to the 
employers that they withdraw temporarily and 
talk the matter over with their former employee. 
The result was that the salesman not only receiv- 
ed his week's wages, but was re-engaged by his 
employers. 

A servant girl brought suit against her former 

152 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

mistress for wages. The hearing brought out 
these facts: The servant girl had a new pair of 
shoes which squeaked, and as she clumped 
around the floor, waiting on the table, the mis- 
tress became nervous and ordered her to walk on 
her tiptoes. The girl obeyed for several days, un- 
til one evening, when there were guests at dinner, 
she came clumping in with her squeaking shoes. 
The mistress thereupon discharged her without 
paying her her wages. The girl told the Court 
she walked on her tiptoes until the muscles of her 
legs were so sore that she could not continue to 
obey her mistress' instructions. The Court, in a 
friendly talk, pointed out to the mistress the un- 
reasonableness of her demands, and she there- 
upon paid the girl her wages. 

The Juvenile Court side of the work is, of 
course, in many ways the most important of all. 
Thousands of boys and girls are dealt with. For- 
merly they were merely treated as "bad," and 
they were dealt with in ways that made them 
worse. This court, like other such courts, treats 
them wherever possible as having been warped, 
or starved, or misdirected, and with a mixture of 
sanity and good temper — and firmness! always 
firmness! — sets them on the right path, tries in 
some degree to smooth the path, and, above all, 
tries to put heart into them. Moreover, thank 
Heaven, the court thoroughly understands that 

153 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

while public institutions for the care and correc- 
tion of boys are often lamentable necessities, 
where there is no home, or where the home is 
hopelessly vile, yet that even the humblest 
home, if it possesses anything of the right 
spirit, is a better place for right upbring- 
ing than the best equipped public institution. 
The "institutionalized'' boy or girl is recognized 
as a rather uncomfortable problem even by those 
who also fully recognize the great service ren- 
dered by many institutions to children w^ho would 
otherwise be on the streets or worse. Perhaps 
we shall ultimately realize the similar danger in 
the "standardized'' child or man or woman. 
"Standardize" is one of the fashionable terms of 
the day; there are plenty of lines of human en- 
deavor — notably in minimum wages and in mini- 
mum standards of comfort in the working and 
living conditions of laborers — in which standard- 
ization is eminently proper; but it is peculiarly 
easy to misdevelop it into a wooden and cramp- 
ing formalism. 

The Juvenile Workers' Bureau in connection 
with the Philadelphia Municipal Court represents 
the pioneer effort to run an employment agency 
of this kind. It meets a very real need; for all 
social workers, and almost all decent citizens who 
have tried to do occasional work for the neigh- 
bors who have been "in trouble," know how hard 

154 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

it is to place probationers. The bureau persuades 
the employer that the ^'bad" boy may really be 
good at heart and in purpose, but needs work and 
some one to take an interest in him. The practi- 
cal success of the bureau has been striking, espe- 
cially when it dealt with boys with whom the real 
difficulty was that they had too much steam and 
no outlet for it. Of course there are many ob- 
stacles to be overcome; one of the gravest is the 
fact that many of the boys who have special 
qualifications for certain kinds of work have no 
qualification for the work which is easiest to ob- 
tain, such as that of an office boy. In the very in- 
teresting report of the court, acknowledgment is 
made of the kind and helpful cooperation of many 
of the leading professional and business firms of 
Philadelphia. In the report is given an example 
of the way in which helping a given boy some- 
times results in helping an entire family, thanks 
to the kindness of some outside individual whose 
sympathy has been enlisted: 

"Michael, the probationer, was 14 years old, 
the oldest of five children and the only member 
of the family able to work. We obtained a posi- 
tion for Michael and delved into his history. We 
found that the father had been in ill health and 
was idle for some time and that the family lived 
in two rooms in a tenement house in the down- 
town section. We enlisted the interest of a 

155 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

prominent Main Line physician, who needed a 
farmer, and though Michael's father knew very 
Httle about farming, the physician agreed to take 
him. The family moved to a cottage on the 
estate and the change has been most beneficial in 
every way. The earning capacity of the family 
was largely increased, with the result that the 
services of Michael as a wage earner are no 
longer needed and he is permitted to continue his 
school studies. From extreme poverty this fam- 
ily is now enjoying a comfortable living. The 
father receives $30 a month and free rent. The 
mother is employed several days a week, and 
sometimes oftener, in the physician's house, earn- 
ing $1.50 each day. The oldest girl of 12 years 
washes the dishes after mealtime and is paid ten 
cents for each service. 

"This is only one case out of many. Early in 
the history of the bureau, when times were par- 
ticularly trying and there were many proba- 
tioners out of employment, we interested 108 per- 
sons in 14 families who were greatly in need of 
assistance." 

But the bureau never commits the dreadful 
fault of reducing all cases to the same test. It 
tries to keep the family together, so long as there 
is any possibility of good coming from the effort; 
but where necessary it unhesitatingly protects 
and separates the boy or girl from the drunken 

156 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

mother or brutal father. In other words, it al- 
ways strives to act with common sense, and as the 
peculiar needs of the case in hand require. A 
large number of philanthropically minded per- 
sons of excellent intention need to keep them- 
selves perpetually in check by reading books by 
such admirably practical workers as Miss Loame 
shows herself to be in that philanthropic classic, 
"The Next Street But One." The Philadelphia 
Municipal Court stands in no such need. 

The court uses every agency to facilitate its 
purpose — playgrounds, settlement houses, and 
schools. The regular probation officers do work 
for which there could be no complete substitute; 
but it can be supplemented by the Big Brother 
movement, and the probation officers do all they 
can to help in the creation of a Big Brother or- 
ganization. As in other divisions of the court, 
so in the Juvenile division every effort is made 
to settle cases without bringing them into court, 
and, if they have to be brought in, to deal with 
them promptly. 

One of the most difficult, and most melancholy, 
features of the court's work is in connection with 
sex crimes. Special effort is made in the case of 
illegitimate children to secure from the father 
proper care for the mother and child. In the 
bad old days — and in accord with the principle 
upheld not only by men, but by most sheltered 

157 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

women, who were selfish, unimaginative, and 
free from temptation — the whole burden fell on 
the wretched woman. She had to care for both 
herself and the child, the man, even if committed, 
paying a mere pittance. Even yet this wretched 
inequality of duty and penalty has been but im- 
perfectly remedied; the changes, however, are in 
the right direction. I was myself sufficiently un- 
der the rule of tradition to assume that the desir- 
able thing was to secure the marriage of the 
parents; but the lady who was chief of the 
woman*s division of the criminal department ex- 
plained to me that in actual practice this had not 
been found desirable. What was needed from 
the father was that he should do his full share 
in supporting the child until it was of age. The 
so-called ''forced" marriages usually cause much 
unhappiness and rarely result in permanent good. 
The maternal instinct is strong; the unmarried 
mother rarely deserts her child ; while the father 
is only too apt to show an animal-like indifference 
to it. 

The hearing is in private, and the suffering 
woman — she may or may not be a wronged woman 
— tells her story to another woman, skilled to find 
out the facts, and to secure the best solution pos- 
sible. The applicant is cared for until the birth 
of the child, and until she has recovered her 
strength ; every effort is made to secure her work, 

158 



SOCIAL JUSTICE 

so that she may keep her child; and every effort 
is made to get the father to pay his full share. 
If the father and mother desire to marry, they are 
of course encouraged to do so. 

Some rather unexpected results were de- 
veloped by the inquiries into the cases of ille- 
gitimacy. To my surprise I was told that the 
vast majority of unmarried mothers were of nor- 
mal mentality; feeble-mindedness played a small 
part. Another surprise to me was the discovery 
that nearly half of the unmarried mothers were 
living at home, and were therefore supposedly 
sheltered; but relatively few of these came into 
court. Nearly a fourth were in domestic service. 
The remainder were in various occupations ; and 
a much larger percentage of these than of domes- 
tic servants came into court to assert their 
rights. 

This is the merest sketch of what the court is 
doing. Some of the work is of a kind never before 
attempted; for example, there has never before 
been an attempt made by court officials to secure 
a reconciliation between man and wife before 
permitting the case to come for trial. There is 
a constant effort to perfect the machinery; and 
with this in view the records are kept with ex- 
traordinary thoroughness. 

But the distinguishing feature of the court is 
not the machinery, but the human factor. The 

159 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

court officers feel a genuine sympathy for the 
men, women and children who come before them, 
or whom they seek out. No machine is of use 
without men and women of the right sort behind 
it. In the Municipal Court of Philadelphia, as 
in every other really first-class institution, the 
human equation is of paramount importance; it 
is the sane, zealous, disinterested work of the 
judges and all the other court officials to which 
the striking quality of the success must be attri- 
buted. 



1 60 



CHAPTER VIIT 

SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

TT is always difficult to discuss a question when 
it proves impossible to define the terms in 
which that question is to be discussed. Therefore 
there is not much to be gained by a discussion of 
Socialism versus Individualism in the abstract. 
Neither absolute Individualism nor absolute So- 
cialism would be compatible with civilization at 
all; and among the arguments of the extremists 
of either side the only unanswerable ones are those 
which show the absurdity of the position of the 
other. Not so much as the first step towards real 
civilization can be taken until there arises some 
development of the right of private property; that 
is, until men pass out of the stage of savage 
socialism in which the violent and the thriftless 
forcibly constitute themselves co-heirs with the 
industrious and the intelligent in what the labor 
of the latter produces. But it is equally true that 
every step toward civilization is marked by a 
check on individualism. The ages that have 
passed have fettered the individualism which 
found expression in physical violence, and we are 

i6i 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

now endeavoring to put shackles on that kind of 
individuahsm which finds expression in craft and 
greed. There is growth in all such matters. The 
individualism of the Tweed Ring type would have 
seemed both commonplace and meritorious to the 
Merovingian Franks, where it was not entirely 
beyond their comprehension; and so in future 
ages, if the world progresses as we hope and be- 
lieve it will progress, the standards of conduct 
which permit individuals to make money out of 
pestilential tenements or by the manipulation of 
stocks, or to refuse to share with their employees 
the burdens laid upon the latter by old age and by 
the inevitable physical risks in a given business, 
will seem as amazing to our descendants as we 
now find the standards of a society which re- 
garded Clovis and his immediate successors as 
pre-eminently fit for leadership. 

There are many American "Socialists" to 
w^hom "Socialism'' is merely a rather vaguely 
conceived catchword, and who use it to express 
their discontent with existing wrongs and their 
purpose to correct them. These may be men of 
high character, who wish to protest against con- 
crete and cruel injustice. So far as they make any 
proposals which tend towards betterment, we can 
wisely act with them. But the real, logical, ad- 
vanced Socialists, who teach their faith as both a 
creed and a party platform, may deceive to their 

162 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

ruin decent and well-meaning, but short-sighted 
men; and there is need of plain speaking in order 
accurately to show the trend of their teaching. 
The leaders of the Socialist party have, in the 
present war, shown themselves the enemies of 
America, and the tools of German militaristic 
brutality. 

The immorality and absurdity of the doctrines 
of Socialism as propounded by these advanced ad- 
vocates are quite as great as those of the 
advocates of an unlimited individualism. As an 
academic matter Herbert Spencer stands as far 
to one side of the line of sane action as Marx 
stands on the other. But practically there is 
more need of refutation of the creed of absolute 
Socialism than of the creed of absolute individ- 
ualism; for it happens that at the present time 
a greater number of visionaries, both sinister and 
merely dreamy, believe in the former than in the 
latter. One difficulty in arguing with professed 
Socialists of the extreme type, however, is that 
those of them who are sincere almost invariably 
suffer from great looseness of thought; for if 
they did not keep their faith nebulous, it would at 
once become abhorrent in the eyes of any upright 
and sensible man. The doctrinaire Socialists, the 
extremists, the self-styled ''scientific" Socialists, 
the men who represent the doctrine in its most 
advanced form, are, and must necessarily be, not 

163 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

only convinced opponents of private property, but 
also bitterly hostile to religion and morality; in 
short, they must be opposed to all those principles 
through which, and through which alone, even an 
imperfect civilization can be built up by slow ad- 
vances through the ages. 

Indeed, these thoroughgoing Socialists occupy, 
in relation to all morality, and especially to do- 
mestic morality, a position which can only be de- 
scribed as revolting. In America the leaders even 
of this type have usually been cautious about 
stating frankly that they proposed to substitute 
free love for married and family life as we have 
it, although many of them do in a round-about 
way uphold this position. In places on the conti- 
nent of Europe, however, they are more straight- 
forward, their attitude being that of the extreme 
French Socialist writer, M. Gabrielle Deville, who 
announces that the Socialists intend to do away 
with both prostitution and marriage, which he 
regards as equally wicked — his method of doing 
away with prostitution being to make unchastity 
universal. Professor Carl Pearson, a leading 
English Socialist, states their position exactly: 
'The sex relation of the future will not be re- 
garded as a union for the birth of children, but 
as the closest form of friendship between man 
and woman. It will be accompanied by no child 
bearing or rearing, or by this in a much more 

164 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

limited number than at present. With the sex 
relationship, so long as it does not result in chil- 
dren, we hold that the state in the future will in 
no wise interfere, but when it does result in chil- 
dren, then the state will have a right to inter- 
fere." He then goes on to point out that in order 
to save the woman from, "economic dependence" 
upon the father of her children, the children will 
be raised at the expense of the state; the usual 
plan being to have huge buildings like foundling 
asylums. 

Mr. Pearson is a scientific man who, in his own 
realm, is worthy of serious heed, and the above 
quotation states in naked form just what logical 
scientific Socialism would really come to. Aside 
from its thoroughly repulsive quality, it ought 
not to be necessary to point out that the condi- 
tion of affairs aimed at would in actual practice 
bring about the destruction of the race within at 
most a couple of generations; and such destruc- 
tion would be heartily to be desired for any race 
of such infamous character as to tolerate such a 
system. Moreover, the ultra-Socialists of our 
own country have shown on occasion, that, so 
far as law and public sentiment will permit, they 
are ready to try to realize the ideals set forth by 
Messrs. Deville and Pearson. To those who 
doubt this statement I commend a book called 
"Socialism; the Nation of Fatherless Children," 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

a book dedicated to the American Federation of 
Labor. The chapters on Free Love, Homeless 
Children, and Two Socialist leaders are espe- 
cially worth reading by any one who is for the 
moment confused by the statements of certain 
Socialist leaders to the effect that advanced So- 
cialism does not contemplate an attack upon mar- 
riage and the family. 

These same Socialist leaders, with a curious 
effrontery, at times deny that the exponents of 
"scientific Socialism" assume a position as re- 
gards industry which in condensed form may be 
stated as, that each man is to do what work he 
can, or, in other words, chooses, and in return is 
to take out from the common fund whatever he 
needs; or, what amounts to the same thing, that 
each man shall have equal remuneration with 
every other man, no matter what work is done. 
If they will turn to a little book recently written 
in England called ''The Case Against Socialism," 
they will find by looking at, say, pages 229 and 
300, or indeed almost at random through the 
book, quotations from recognized Socialist lead- 
ers taking exactly this position; indeed, it is the 
position generally taken — though it is often op- 
posed or quaHfied, for Socialist leaders usually 
think confusedly, and often occupy inconsistent 
positions. Mrs. Besant, for instance, putting it 
pithily, says that we must come to the ''equal re- 

;66 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

muneration of all workers" ; and one of her col- 
leagues, that "the whole of our creed is that in- 
dustry shall be carried on, not for the profit of 
those engaged in it, whether masters or men, but 
for the benefit of the community. ... It is 
not for the miners, bootmakers, or shop assist- 
ants as such that we Socialists claim the profits of 
industry, but for the citizen." In our own coun- 
try, in "Socialism Made Plain," a book officially 
circulated by the Milwaukee division of the So- 
cialist party, the statement is explicit: "Under the 
labor time-check medium of exchange proposed 
by Socialists, any laborer could exchange the 
wealth he produced in any given number of hours 
for the wealth produced by any other laborer in 
the same number of hours." It is unnecessary to 
point out that the pleasing idea of these writers 
could be realized only if the state undertook the 
duty of task-master, for otherwise it is not con- 
ceivable that anybody whose work would be 
worth anything would work at all under such 
conditions. Under this type of Socialism, there- 
fore, or communism, the Government would have 
to be the most drastic possible despotism ; a des- 
potism so drastic that its realization would only 
be an ideal. Of course in practice such a system 
could not work at all ; and incidentally the mere 
attempt to realize it would necessarily be accom- 
panied by a corruption so gross that the blackest 

167 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

spot of corruption in any existing form of city 
government would seem bright by comparison. 

In other words, on the social and domestic 
side doctrinaire Socialism would replace the fam- 
ily and home life by a glorified state free-lunch 
counter and state foundling asylum, deliberately 
enthroning self-indulgence as the ideal, with, on 
its darker side, the absolute abandonment of all 
morality as between man and woman; while in 
place of what Socialists call "wage slavery" 
there would be created a system which would 
necessitate either the prompt dying out of the 
community through sheer starvation, or an iron 
despotism over all workers, compared to which 
any slave system of the past would seem benefi- 
cent, because less utterly hopeless. 

"Advanced" Socialists leaders are fond of de- 
claiming against patriotism, of announcing their 
movement as international, and of claiming to 
treat all men alike. As regards patriotism their 
'^\ practice is generally as bad as their preaching; 
-J in this war the Socialist leaders have played the 
part of traitors to America, and many sincere 
men have in consequence left the Socialist party 
— although as so many of the Socialist leaders 
here are Germans, and as they have been warm 
upholders of every revolting act of the German 
autocracy, they may claim that their patriotism 
is merely inverted. But as regards real in- 

J68 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

ternationalism, the Socialists would not for one 
moment stand the test of actual experiment. 
If the leaders of the Socialist party in Amer- 
ica should to-day endeavor to force their fol- 
lowers to admit all negroes and Chinamen to a 
real equality, their party would promptly disband, 
and rather than submit to such putting into effect 
of their avowed purpose, would, as a literal fact, 
follow any capitalistic organization as an- alter- 
native. 

It is not accident that makes thoroughgoing 
and radical Socialists adopt the principles of free 
love as a necessary sequence to insisting that no 
man shall have the right to what he earns. When 
Socialism of this really advanced and logical type, 
or any social system really, although not nomi- 
nally, akin to it, is tried as it was in France in 
1792, and again under the Commune in 187 1, it is 
inevitable that the movement, ushered in with 
every kind of high-sounding phrase, should rap- 
idly spread so as to include, not merely the forcible 
acquisition of the property of others, but every 
conceivable form of monetary corruption, immo- 
rality, licentiousness, and murderous violence. In 
theory, distinctions can be drawn between this 
kind of SociaHsm and anarchy and nihilism; but 
in practice, as in 1871, the apostles of all three 
act together; and if the doctrines of any of them 
could be applied universally, all the troubles of 

369 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

society would indeed cease, because society itselt 
would cease. The poor and the helpless, espe- 
cially women and children, would be the first to 
die out, and the few survivors would go back to 
the condition of skin-clad savages, so that the 
whole painful and laborious work of social de- 
velopment would have to begin over again. Of 
course, long before such an event really happened 
the Socialistic regime would have been over- 
turned, and in the reaction men would welcome 
any kind of one-man tyranny that was compati- 
ble with the existence of civilization. 

So much for the academic side of unadulter- 
ated, or as its advocates style it, "advanced scien- 
tific" Socialism. Its representatives in this coun- 
try who have practically striven to act up to their 
extreme doctrines, and have achieved leadership 
in any one of the branches of the Socialist party, 
especially the parlor Socialists and the like, be 
they lay or clerical, deserve scant consideration at 
the hands of honest and clean-living men and 
women. What their movement leads to may be 
gathered from the fact that in several Presiden- 
tial elections they nominated and voted for a man 
who earned his livelihood as the editor of a paper 
which not merely practiced every form of malig- 
nant and brutal slander, but condoned and en- 
couraged every form of brutal wrong-doing, so 
long as either the slander or the violence was sup- 

170 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

posed to be at the expense of a man who owned 
something — wholly without regard to whether 
that man was himself a scoundrel, or a wise, kind 
and helpful member of the community. As for 
the so-called Christian Socialists who associate \ 
themselves with this movement, they either are \ 
or ought to be aware of the pornographic litera- \ 
ture, the pornographic propaganda, which make j 
up one side of the movement. That criminal non- 
sense should be listened to eagerly by some men 
bowed down by the cruel conditions of much of 
modern toil is not strange ; but that men who pre- 
tend to speak with culture of mind and authority 
to teach, men who are or have been preachers of 
the Gospel or professors in universities, should 
affiliate themselves with the preachers of criminal 
nonsense is a sign of grave mental or moral 
shortcoming. 

I wish it to be remembered that I speak from 
the standpoint of, and on behalf of, the wage- 
worker and the tiller of the soil. These are the 
two men whose welfare I have ever before me, 
and for their sakes I would do anything, except 
anything that is wrong; and it is because I be- 
lieve that teaching them doctrine like that which 
I have stigmatized represents the most cruel 
wrong in the long run, both to wage worker and 
to earth-tiller, that I reprobate and denounce such 
conduct. 

171 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

We need have but scant patience with those 
who assert that modern conditions are all that 
they should be, or that they cannot be immensely 
improved. The wildest or most vicious of Social- 
istic writers could preach no more foolish doc- 
trine than that contained in some ardent defenses 
of uncontrolled capitalism and individualism. 
There are dreadful woes in modern life, dreadful 
suffering among some of those who toil, brutal 
wrong-doing among some of those who make co- 
lossal fortunes by exploiting the toilers. It is the 
duty of every honest and upright man, of every 
man who holds within his breast the capacity for 
righteous indignation, to recognize these wrongs, 
and to strive with all his might to bring about a 
better condition of things. But he will never 
bring about this better condition by misstating 
facts and advocating remedies which are not 
merely false, but fatal. 

Take, for instance, the doctrine of the extreme 
Socialists, that all wealth is produced by manual 
workers, that the entire product of labor should 
be handed over every day to the laborer, that 
wealth is criminal in itself. Of course wealth or 
property is no more criminal than labor. Human 
society could not exist without both; and if all 
wealth were abolished this week, the majority of 
laborers would starve next week. As for the 
statement that all wealth is produced by manual 

172 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

workers, in order to appreciate its folly it is 
merely necessary for any man to look at what is 
happening right around him, in the next street, 
or the next village. In New York, on Broadway 
between Ninth and Tenth Streets, is a huge dry- 
goods store. The business was originally started, 
and the block of which I am speaking was built 
for the purpose, by an able New York merchant. 
It prospered. He and those who invested under 
him made a good deal of money. Their employ- 
ees did well. Then he died, and certain other peo- 
ple took possession of it and tried to run the busi- 
ness. The manual labor was the same, the good- 
will was the same, the physical conditions were 
the same, but the guiding intelligence at the top 
had changed. The business was run at a loss. 
It would surely have had to shut, and all the em- 
ployees, clerks, laborers, have been turned adrift, 
to infinite suffering, if it had not again changed 
hands and another business man of capacity 
taken charge. The business was the same as be- 
fore, the physical conditions were the same, the 
good-will the same, the manual labor the same, 
but the guiding intelligence had changed, and 
now everything once more prospered, and pros- 
pered as had never been the case before. With 
such an instance before our very eyes, with such 
proof of what every business proves, namely, the 
vast importance of the part played by the guiding 

173 



THE FOES OF OUPt OWN HOUSEHOLD 

intelligence in business, as in war, in invention, 
in art, in science, in every imaginable pursuit, it 
is really difficult to show patience when asked to 
discuss such a proposition as that all wealth is 
produced solely by the work of manual workers, 
and that the entire product should be handed 
over to them. Of course, if any such theory were 
really acted upon, there would soon be no product 
to be handed over to the manual laborers, and 
they would die of starvation. When the workers 
themselves recognize the need of able, highly 
skilled and well-paid managers and leaders they 
will be able themselves to own and control great 
industries. But until this is done a great indus- 
try can no more be managed by a mass-meeting 
of manual laborers than a battle can be won in 
such fashion, than a painters' union can paint a 
Rembrandt, or a typographical union write one 
of Shakespeare's plays. 

The fact is that this kind of Socialism repre- 
sents an effort to enthrone privilege in its crudest 
form. Much of what we are fighting against in 
modern civilization is privilege. We fight against 
privilege when it takes the form of a franchise to 
a street railway company to enjoy the use of the 
streets of a great city without paying an adequate 
return ; when it takes the form of a great business 
combination which grows rich by rebates which" 
are denied to other shippers; when it takes the 

174 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

form of a stock-gambling operation v/hich results 
in the v/atering of railway securities so that cer- 
tain inside men get an enormous profit out of a 
swindle on the public. All these represent vari- 
ous forms of illegal, or, if not illegal, then anti- 
social, privilege. But there can be no greater 
abuse, no greater example of corrupt and destruc- 
tive privilege, than that advocated by those who 
say that each man should put into a common store 
w^hat he can and take out what he needs. This 
is merely another way of saying that the thrift- 
less and the vicious, who could or would put in 
but little, should be entitled to take out the earn- 
ings of the intelligent, the foresighted, and the 
industrious. Such a proposition is morally base. 
To choose to live by theft or by charity neces- 
sarily means the complete loss of self-respect. 
The worst wrongs that capitalism can commit 
upon labor would sink into insignificance when 
compared with the hideous wrong done by those 
who would degrade labor by entailing upon it 
the rapid lowering of self-reliance. The Roman 
mob, living on the bread given them by the 
state and clamoring for excitement and 
amusement to be purveyed by the state, rep- 
resent for all time the very nadir to which a 
free and self-respecting population of workers 
can sink if they grow habitually to rely upon 
others, and especially upon the state, either to 

175 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

furnish them, charity, or to permit them to plun- 
der, as a means of HveHhood. 

In short, it is simply common sense to recog- 
nize that there is the widest inequality of service, 
and that therefore there must be a reasonably 
wide inequality of reward, if our society is to rest 
upon the basis of justice and wisdom. Service is 
the true test by which a man's worth should be 
judged. We are against privilege in any form: 
privilege to the capitalist who exploits the poor 
man, and privilege to the shiftless or vicious poor 
man who would rob his thrifty brother of what 
he has earned. Certain exceedingly valuable 
forms of service are rendered wholly without 
capital. On the other hand, there are exceedingly 
valuable forms of service which can be rendered 
only by means of great accumulations of capital, 
and not to recognize this fact would be to deprive 
our whole people of one of the great agencies for 
their betterment. 

The test of a man's worth to the com- 
munity is the service he renders to it, and 
we cannot afford to make this test by material 
considerations alone. One of the main vices of 
the Socialism which was propounded by Proud- 
hon, Lassalle, and Marx, and which is preached 
by their disciples and imitators, is that it is blind 
to everything except the merely material side of 
life. It is not only indifferent, but at bottom hos- 

176 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

tile, to the intellectual,* the religious, the domes- 
tic and moral life ; it is a form of communism with 
no moral foundation, but essentially based on the 
immediate annihilation of personal ownership of 
capital, and, in the near future, the annihilation 
of the family, and ultimately the annihilation of 
civilization. 

But the more we condemn unadulterated 
Marxian Socialism, the stouter should be our in- 
sistence on thoroughgoing social reforms. As 
for the distinction between Marxian Socialism 
and that socialism which is merely another name 
for social reform, I commend all who are inter- 
ested to the little book by Vladimir Simkovich 
called ''Marxism versus Socialism." 

It is true that the doctrines of communistic So- 
cialism, if consistently followed, mean the ultimate 
annihilation of civilization. Yet the converse is 
also true. Ruin faces us if we decline to 
try to reshape our whole civilization in accord- 
ance with the law of service, and if we permit 
ourselves to be misled by any empirical or aca- 
demic consideration into refusing to exert the 
common power of the community where only col- 
lective action can do what individualism has left 
undone, or can remedy the wrongs done by an 
unrestricted and ill-regulated individualism. 
There is terrible evil in our social and in- 
dustrial conditions to-day, and unless we rec- 

177 




THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ognize this fact and try resolutely to do what we 
can to remedy the evil, we run great risk of see- 
ing men in their misery turn to the false teachers 
whose doctrines would indeed lead them to 
greater misery, but who do at least recognize the 
fact that they are now miserable. 

I have scant patience with the men who fear 
to adopt necessary reforms lest they be stigma- 
tized as "socialistic." Let us not be frightened 
by the term. Personally I believe that our young 
men should all render industrial service as well 
as military service. There is no necessary work 
which any man should regard as dishonorable; 
but there is plenty of necessary work which it 
is not a good thing for any one to have to do 
all his life; and there are seasonal industries 
which demand for short periods large numbers 
of workers but offer them no steady employ- 
ment. A year's industrial service to the common- 
wealth by every young man would be an advan- 
tage from every standpoint. It would generally 
be hard, unskilled labor; it would build up the 
man himself, physically and morally; it would 
prevent the permanent employment of men in 
trades which no man should permanently follow; 
it would enable the state to help meet crises in 
the demand for occasional or seasonal labor; 
it would greatly develop mutual sympathy and 
understanding among all sorts of rich and 

178 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

poor who had actually toiled at the same tasks. 
Of course I recognize that this is for the far 
future. But immediate needs can be met. At 
the present time there are scores of laws in the 
interest of wage workers and soil-tillers, of 
workingmen and farmers, which should be 
passed by the National and the various State 
Legislatures; and those who wish to do effective 
work against Socialism would do well to turn 
their energies into securing the enactment of 
these laws. 

It cannot be too often said that Socialism is 
both a wide and a loose term, and that the self- 
styled Socialists are of many and utterly different 
types. If we should study only the professed 
apostles of radical Socialism, or if we should 
study only what active leaders of Socialism in 
this country have usually done, or read only 
the papers in which they have usually ex- 
pressed themselves — which papers, by the way, 
are at least as low in moral tone, at least as 
reckless in their mendacity, as the worst "capi- 
. talist" sheets — we would gain an utterly wrong 
impression of very many persons who call 
themselves Socialists. The recent experience of 
the Socialist mayor of Schenectady with the So- 
cialist State "machine," as told by himself, shows 
that the worst abuses of machine and boss ty- 
ranny in the old political parties are surpassed 

179 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

in practice by the conduct of the SociaHst party 
when in power. Nevertheless there are plenty 
of self-styled Socialists who have proved them- 
selves excellent public servants. There are many 
peculiarly high-minded men and women who like 
to speak of themselves as Socialists, but whose 
attitude, conscious or unconscious, is really merely 
an indignant recognition of the evil of present 
conditions and an ardent wish to remedy them, 
and whose Socialism is really only an advanced 
form of liberalism. Many of these men and 
women do in actual fact take a large part in the 
advancement of moral ideas, and in practice 
wholly repudiate the purely materialistic, and 
therefore sordid, doctrines of those Socialists 
whose creed really is in sharp antagonism to 
every principle of public and domestic morality, 
and who do war on private property with a bit- 
terness but little greater than that with which 
they war against the institutions of the home and 
the family, and against every form, of religion. 
Catholic or Protestant. The Socialists of this 
moral type may in practice be very good citizens 
indeed, with whom we can at many points co- 
operate. They are often joined temporarily with i 
what are called the "opportunist Socialists'' — 
those who may advocate an impossible and highly 
undesirable Utopia as a matter of abstract faith, 
but who in practice try to secure the adoption only 

i8o 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

of some given principle which will do away with 
some phase of existing wrong. With these two 
groups of Socialists it is often possible and indeed 
necessary for all far-sighted men to join heartily 
in the effort to secure a given reform or do away 
with a given abuse. Probably, in practice, wher- 
ever and whenever Socialists of these two types 
are able to form, themselves into a party, they 
will disappoint both their own expectations and 
the fears of others by acting very much like other 
parties, like other aggregations of men; and it 
will be safe to adopt whatever they advance that 
is wise, and to reject whatever they advance that 
is foolish, just as we have to do as regards count- 
less other groups who on one issue or set of 
issues come together to strive for a change in the 
political or social conditions of the world we live 
in. The important thing is generally the "next 
step." We ought not to take it unless we are 
sure that it is advisable ; but we should not hesi- 
tate to take it when once we are sure ; and we can 
safely join with others who also wish to take it, 
without bothering our heads overmuch as to any 
somewhat fantastic theories they may have con- 
cerning, say, the two hundredth step, which is 
not yet in sight. 

There are many schemes proposed which their 
enemies, and a few of their friends, are pleased 
to call Socialistic, or which are indorsed and fav- 

i8i 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ored by men who call themselves Socialists, but 
which are entitled each to be considered on its 
merits with regard only to the practical advan- 
tage which each would confer. Every public man, 
every reformer, is bound to refuse to dismiss 
these schemes with the shallow statement that they 
are "Socialistic"; for such an attitude is one of 
mere mischievous dogmatism. There are com- 
munities in which our system of state education 
is still resisted and condemned as Socialism ; and 
we have seen in this country men who were them- 
selves directors in National banks which were 
supervised by the Government, object to such su- 
pervision of other corporations by the Govern- 
ment on the ground that it was "Socialistic.'* An 
employers' liability or old-age pension law is no 
more Socialistic than a fire department ; the regu- 
lation of railway rates is by no means as Socialis- 
tic as the digging and enlarging of the Erie Canal 
at the expense of the state. As communities be- 
come more thickly settled and their lives more 
complex, it grows ever more and more necessary 
for some of the work formerly performed by in- 
dividuals, each for himself, to be performed by 
the community for the community as a whole. 
Isolated farms need no complicated system of 
sewerage ; but this does not mean that public con- 
trol of sewerage in a great city should be resisted 
on the ground that it tends toward Socialism. 

182 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

Nowadays nobody denies this particular propo- 
sition, but there are plenty of persons who 
deny precisely similar propositions. Let each 
proposition be treated on its own merits, soberly 
and cautiously, but without any of that rigidity 
of mind which fears all reform. If, for instance, 
the question arises as to the establishment of day 
nurseries for the children of mothers who work 
in factories, the obvious thing to do is to ap- 
proach it with an open mind, listen to the argu- 
ments for and against, and, if necessary, try the 
experiment in actual practice. We cannot afford 
to dismiss such a proposition off-hand as ''Social- 
istic." We should look into the matter with an 
open mind, and try to find out, not what we want 
the facts to be, but what the facts really are. 

Again we cannot afford to subscribe to the doc- 
trine, equally hard and foolish, that the welfare 
of the children in the tenement-house district is 
no concern of the community as a whole. If the 
child of the thronged city cannot live in decent 
surroundings, have teaching, have room to play, 
have good water and clean air, then not only will 
he suffer, but in the next generation the whole 
community will to a greater or less degree share 
his suffering. If this be Socialism, make the 
most of it! 

In striving to better our industrial life we must 
ever keep in mind that, while we cannot afford to 

183 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

neglect its material side, we can even less afford to 
disregard its moral and intellectual side. Each 
of us is bound to remember that he is in very 
truth his brother's keeper, and that his duty is, 
with judgment and common sense, to try to help 
the brother. To the base and greedy attitude of 
mind which adopts as its motto, "What is thine 
is mine," we oppose the doctrine of service, the 
doctrine that insists that each of us, in no hys- 
terical manner, but with common sense and good 
judgment, and without neglect of his or her own 
interests, shall yet act on the saying, "What is 
mine I will in good measure make thine also." 

We should all join in the effort to do away 
with any evil; we should realize that failure to 
grapple with grave evil may mean ruin in the 
future ; but we should refuse to have anything to 
do with remedies which are either absurd or mis- 
chievous, for such, of course, would merely ag- 
gravate the present suffering. The first thing to 
recognize is that, while economic reform is often 
vital, it is never all-sufficient. The moral reform, 
the change of character — in which law can some- 
times play a large, but never the largest, part — is 
the most necessary of all. 

There are many questions as to which the 
ultra-socialists occupy a position which is not 
merely indifferent, but antogonistic to all moral- 
ity. As I have already said, this is notably true 

184 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

as regards the questions of sex. In dealing 
with the marriage relation the Socialist attitude 
is one of unmixed evil. Our effort should be to 
raise the level of self-respect, self-control, sense 
of duty in both sexes, and not to push them 
down to an evil equality of moral turpitude by 
doing away with the self-restraint and sense of 
obligation which have been slowly built up 
through the ages. We must bring them to a 
moral level by raising the lower standard, not 
by depressing the high. 

However — and this we must say again, and 
again, and again — the fact that the professed 
socialists hold views that are on some points pro- 
foundly immoral, does not in the smallest degree 
excuse us from warring against existing evils. 
To fail to do so would rank us among the foes of 
this nation's own household. And in thus war- 
ring, we must lose sight neither of our moral 
nor of our economic needs. 

We should do everything that can be done, by 
law or otherwise, to keep the avenues of occupa- 
tion, of employment, of work, of interest, so open 
that there shall be, so far as it is humanly possi- 
ble to achieve it, a measureable equality of oppor- 
tunity; an equality of opportunity for each man 
to show the stuff that is in him. We ought, as 
far as possible, to make it possible for each man 
to obtain the education, the training which will 

185 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

enable him, to take advantage of the opportunity, 
if he has the stuff in him to do so. When it | 
comes to reward, let each man, within the limits 
set by a sound and far-sighted morality, get what, 
by his energy, intelligence, thrift, courage, he is 
able to get, with the opportunity open. We must 
set our faces against privilege; just as much 
against the kind of privilege which would let the 
shiftless and lazy laborer take what his brother 
has earned as against the privilege which allows i 
the huge capitalist to take toll to which he is not 
entitled. We stand for equality of opportunity, 
but not for equality of reward unless there is also 
equality of service. If the service is equal, let the 
reward be equal; but let the reward depend on 
the service; and, mankind being composed as it 
is, there will be inequality of service for a long 
time to come, no matter how great the equality of 
opportunity may be ; and just so long as there is 
inequality of service it is eminently desirable that 
there should be inequality of reward. 

We recognize, and are bound to war against, 
the evils of to-day. The remedies are partly eco- 
nomic and partly spiritual, partly to be obtained 
by laws, and in greater part to be obtained by 
individual and associated effort; for character is 
the vital matter, and character cannot be created 
by law. These remedies include a religious and 
moral teaching which shall increase the spirit of 

1 86 



SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM 

human brotherhood ; an educational system which 
shall train men for every form of useful service — 
and which shall train us to prize common sense 
no less than morality; such a division of the 
profits of industry as shall tend to encourage in- 
telligent and thrifty tool-users to become tool- 
owners; and a Government so strong, just, wise, 
and democratic that, neither lagging too far be- 
hind nor pushing heedlessly in advance, it may do 
its full share in promoting these ends. 



187 



CHAPTER IX 
THE farmer; the corner-stone of 

CIVILIZATION 

O ECENTLY an Indiana woman was peeling 
some potatoes, and in a hollow in one she 
found a note from the Southern farmer who 
had raised the potatoes running: 

"I got 69c. a bushel for these potatoes. How 
much did you pay for them?" 

She wrote back: 

"I paid $4 per bushel/' 

The farmer sent her just one more letter. It 
said : 

"I got 69c. for those potatoes. It could not 
have cost more than 31c. to carry them to you. 
Who got the other $3? I am going to try to 
find out." 

It is idle to say that when such an occurrence 
is typical — and it most certainly is to a large 
extent typical — there is no cause for uneasiness. 
Something is wrong. It may be wholly the 
fault of outsiders. It may be at least partially 
the fault of the farmers and of those who eat 
the food the farmers raise. The trouble may 

188 



THE FARMER 

be so deep-rooted in our social system that ex- 
treme caution must be exercised in striving for 
betterment. But one thing is certain. The 
situation is not satisfactory and calls for a 
thoroughgoing investigation, with the deter- 
mination to make whatever changes, including 
radical changes, are necessary in order once 
more to put on a healthy basis the oldest and 
most essential of all occupations, the occupation 
which is the foundation of all others, the occupa- 
tion of the tiller of the soil, of the man who by 
his own labor raises the raw material of food and 
clothing, without which the whole fabric of the 
most gorgeous civilization will topple in a week. 

We cannot permanently shape our course 
right on any international issue unless we are 
sound on the domestic issues; and this farm 
movement is the fundamental social issue — the 
one issue which is even more basic than the re- 
lations of capitalist and workingman. The 
farm industry cannot stop; the world is never 
more than a year from starvation; this great 
war has immensely increased the cost of living 
without commensurately improving the condi- 
tion of the men who produce the things on which 
we live. Even in this country the situation has 
become grave. 

The temporary causes of this situation have 
produced such effect in our land only because 

189 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

they aggravated conditions due to fundamental 
causes which have long been at work. These 
fundamental causes may all be included in one: 
the farmers' business in our country has re- 
mained almost unchanged during the cen- 
tury which has seen every other business 
change in profound and radical fashion. He 
still works by methods belonging to the day 
of the stage-coach and the horse canal-boat, 
while every other brain or hand worker in the 
country has been obliged to shape his methods 
into more or less conformity to those required 
by an age of steam and electricity. 

Our commercial, banking, manufacturing, and 
transportation systems have been built up with 
a rapidity never before approached. We 
have accumulated wealth at an unheard of rate. 
There has been grave injustice in the distribu- 
tion of the wealth, our law-givers having erred 
both by unwisdom in leaving the matter alone, 
and at times by even greater unwisdom whcr 
they interfered with it. But on the whole the 
growth and prosperity have been enormous ; and 
yet we have allowed the basic industry of farm- 
ing, the industry which underlies all economic 
life, to drift along haphazard, we have allowed 
the life of the dwellers in the open country to 
become more and more meager, and their 
methods of production and of marketing to re- 

190 



THE FARMER 

main so primitive that their soil was impover- 
ished and their profits largely usurped by 
others. 

In 1880, one farmer in four was a tenant; and 
at that time the tenant was still generally a 
young man to whom the position of tenant was 
merely an intermediate step between that of 
farm laborer and that of a farm owner. In 19 10, 
over one farmer in three had become a tenant; 
and nowadays it becomes steadily more difficult 
to pass from the tenant to the owner stage. If 
the process continues unchecked, half a century 
hence we shall have deliberately permitted our- 
selves to plunge into the situation which brought 
chaos in Ireland, and which in England resulted 
in the complete elimination of the old yeomanry, 
so that nearly nine-tenths of English farmers 
to-day are tenants and the consequent class 
division is most ominous for the future. France 
and Germany are to-day distinctly better off 
than we are in this respect; and in New Zealand, 
where there is an excellent system of land dis- 
tribution, only one-seventh of the farmers are 
tenants. 

If the tendencies that have produced such a 
condition continue to work unchecked no pro- 
phetic power is needed to foretell disaster to the 
nation.. Therefore, the one hopeless attitude, in 
this as in recent international matters, is "watch- 

191 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ful waiting/' sitting still and doing nothing to 
prepare for or to avert disaster. It is far better 
to try experiments, even when we are not cer- 
tain how these experiments will turn out, or 
when we are certain that the proposed plan con- 
tains elements of folly as well as elements of 
wisdom. Better "trial and ^rror" than no trial 
at all. And the service test, the test of actual 
experiment, is the only conclusive test. It is 
only the attempt in actual practice to realize a 
realizable ideal' that contains hope. Mere writ- 
ing and oratory and enunciation of theory, with 
no attempt to secure the service test, amount to 
nothing. 

This applies to the tenancy problem. It also 
applies to every other farming problem. As re- 
gards each, let us test the plans for reform, so 
far as may be, by actual practice. 

For many of these plans the several states 
offer themselves as natural laboratories, where 
experiments can be tried when conditions and 
public opinion are right; and this although the 
permanent remedies must ultimately, at least in 
major part, be national. It is exceedingly inter- 
esting to watch such an experiment as that seem- 
ingly to be tried in North Dakota. This is a 
farming state, where the farming is the predom- 
inant interest, and inasmuch as all reforms cost 
money, and as even advisable reforms become 

192 



THE FARMER 

utterly disastrous if in spending money upon 
them we treat "the sky as the Hmit," and decHne 
to consider the proportion between what the re- 
form achieves and what it costs, it is well that the 
farmers therjjselves should pay a good propor- 
tion of the cost of reforms necessary to and 
peculiarly affecting themselves. In North 
Dakota, in addition to matters like hail insur- 
ance, it is proposed that the state shall pur- 
chase and operate grain elevators, mills and 
terminals and other business instrumentalities 
of vital concern to farmers. I most heartily com- 
mend the earnest effort the leaders in the move- 
ment have made actually to better conditions; 
and I say this although from the facts at my com- 
mand I judge that most of the work which 
it is thus proposed to have done by the state 
could be done better by cooperative societies 
among the farmers themselves. Present con- 
ditions should certainly be changed. To keep 
them unchanged is to act in a spirit of mere 
Toryism. From the North Dakota experiment, 
when put in actual practice, we can learn some 
things to follow and some things to avoid; and 
perhaps we can also learn to be wise in time, 
and, by sane determination to put in practice re- 
forms that we are reasonably sure will have no 
bad effects, avoid the sad necessity of paying 

193 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

with out own skins for experiments which prob- 
ably will have bad effects. 

I greatly prefer to see the Government leave 
untouched whatever the corporations under Gov- 
ernment supervision can do; and just as far as 
possible I want to see all the corporations made 
into cooperative associations. But there are 
things so important that the Government must 
do them, if it is only through such exercise of 
collective power that they can be done. 

Our object must be (i) to make the tenant 
farmer a landowner; (2) to eliminate as far as 
possible the conditions which produce the shift- 
ing, seasonal, tramp type of labor, and to give 
the farm laborer a permanent status, a career as 
a farmer, for which his school education shall 
fit him, and which shall open to him the chance 
of in the end earning the ownership in fee of his 
own farm; (3) to secure cooperation among the 
small landowners, so that their energies shall 
produce the best possible results; (4) by pro- 
gressive taxation or in other fashion to break 
up and prevent the formation of great landed 
estates, especially in so far as they consist of 
unused agricultural land; (5) to make capital 
available for the farmers, and thereby put them 
more on an equality with other men engaged in 
business; (6) to care for the woman on the farm 
as much as for the man, and to eliminate the 

194 



THE FARMER 

conditions which now so often tend to make her 
hfe one of gray and sterile drudgery; (7) to do 
this primarily through the farmer himself, but 
also, when necessary, by the use of the entire 
collective power of the people of the country ; for 
the welfare of the farmer is the concern of all 
of us. 

The most important thing to do is to make the 
tenant farmer a farm owner. He must be 
financed so that he can acquire title to the land. 
In New Zealand the government buys land and 
sells it to small holders at the price paid with 
a low rate of interest. Perhaps our Govern- 
ment could try this plan, or else could outright 
advance the money, charging three and a half 
per cent, interest. Default in payments — which 
should of course be on easy terms — would mean 
that the land reverted to the Government. The 
experience of the firms which have loaned to 
the largest number of people to acquire homes 
on small instalment payments has been that 
foreclosure occurs in a very small percentage 
of cases; but it would have to be absolutely un- 
derstood that no failure to pay would be toler- 
ated; for such toleration would in the end dis- 
credit the whole system, and work ruin to 
the honest and hard-working men who would 
pay. We could follow the precedents estab- 
lished in connection with the reclamation act 

195 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

in the arid and semi-arid regions of the West. 
It would be desirable, and entirely feasible, to 
try the experiment first on a small scale, 
in experimental fashion; and then to apply 
it on a larger and larger scale with the modifica- 
tions shown to be necessary in actual practice. 

To break up the big estates it might be best 
to try the graduated land tax, or else to equalize 
taxes as between used and unused agricultural 
land, which would prevent farm land being held 
for speculative purposes. There can without 
question be criticism of either proposal. If any 
better proposal can be made and tried we can 
cheerfully support it and be guided in our 
theories by the way it turns out. But we ought 
to insist on something being done — not merely 
talked about. Every one is agreed that we 
ought to get more people "back to the land"; 
but talk on the subject is utterly useless unless 
we put it in concrete shape and se<:ure a 
"service test" even although it costs some money 
to furnish the means for doing what we say 
must be done. 

As regards furnishing capital to the farmer, 
the first need is that we shall understand that 
this is essential, and is recognized to be essential 
in most civilized lands outside of Russia and 
the United States, but especially in Denmark, 
France and Germany. Our farmers must have 

196 



THE FARMER 

working capital. The present laws for pro- 
viding farm loans do not meet the most im- 
portant case of all, that of the tenant farmer, 
and do not adequately provide for the land- 
owning farmer. An immense amount of new 
capital — an amount to be reckoned in billions 
of dollars — is needed for the proper develop- 
ment of the farms of the United States, in order 
that our farmers may pass from the position of 
under-production per acre, may improve and 
fertilize their lands, and so stock them as both 
to secure satisfactory returns upon the money 
invested and also enormously to increase the 
amount of food produced, while permanently 
enhancing the value of the land. Lack of capital 
on the part of the farmer inevitably means soil 
exhaustion and therefore diminished production. 
The farmer who is to prosper must have capital; 
only the prosperous can really meet the needs 
of the consumer; and in this, as in every other 
kind of honest business, the only proper basis 
of success is benefit to both buyer and seller, 
producer and consumer. 

To achieve certain of these objects it may 
be necessary to make use of the Government; 
but wherever possible it is better to use private, 
usually corporate or cooperative, efifort. I believe 
that the day is coming when many kinds of suc- 
cessful business will admit, and insist on, an 

197 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

alloy of philanthropy. It often adds to, instead 
of diminishing, business success, to become 
within reasonable limits one's brother's keeper. 
(Is it necessary to say that in this as in every- 
thing else there is need of common sense?) 

The Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid 
Society has actually tried the experiment of a 
land bank to help men become farmers. In 
seventeen years, at an outlay of two million 
dollars, it has established thirty-five hundred 
families on farms; and the losses have been 
small. The manager of this society is now head 
of the Federal Land Bank in Springfield, Massa- 
chusetts. He has proposed an agrarian land 
bank to do for the United States as a whole what 
it has already taken part in successfully doing 
for some thousands of people. Such a land 
bank would aid tenants to become landowners, 
agricultural laborers to become small farmers, 
and landless immigrants with a farming past to 
go out on the land — where we need them. 

California, under the wise administration of 
Hiram Johnson, pointed the path for advance in 
this as in so many other directions. She has 
begun the development of five thousand acres, 
not by merely throwing the land open for settle- 
ment, but by building roads, school-houses, and 
even certain "improvements" on farms of suit- 
able size; the effort has been to help the man 

198 



THE FARMER 

who wishes to farm to go into the country and 
there find Hveable conditions. 

Whenever farmers themselves have the in- 
telligence and energy to work through co- 
operative societies this is far better than having 
the state undertake the work. Community self- 
help is normally preferable to using the machin- 
ery of Government for tasks to which it is un- 
accustomed. This applies to the ownership of 
granaries, slaughter-houses, and the like. There 
are in Europe cooperative farmers' associations 
which own and run at a profit many such in- 
stitutions; and when this is shown to be the 
case, the other owners of such agencies face the 
accomplished fact; and it often becomes possible 
for the farmers then to deal with them on a 
satisfactory basis. 

In Europe these great farmer cooperative as- 
sociations sometimes control the whole machin- 
ery by which their products are marketed. Each 
little district has its own cooperative group. The 
groups of all the districts in the state are united 
again in a large cooperative unit. In this way 
they do collectively what is beyond the power o 
any one farmer individually to accomplish. By 
sending their shipments to market they move 
them in great bulk-quantities at the lowest 
possible cost. They contract for long periods 
ahead and sell in the most advantageous market, 

199 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

Middlemen are eliminated. The labor of moving 
farm products is reduced to a minimum. But 
these enterprises are not state enterprises. The 
relationship of the state to them is confined to 
supervision, just as our bank examiners super- 
vise the association of stockholders who come 
together to do a banking business; and certain 
general regulations that are in the interest of 
public policy are imposed upon them. A 
standard of equity and fair dealing is main- 
tained by the forcing of the publication of ac- 
counts and by supplying disinterested examiners 
who see to it that equity is preserved by hon- 
esty and fairness among those associated in the 
enterprise. 

Of course the personal equation is all im- 
portant; the best of schemes will work badly if 
we force it against the fundamental issues of 
fairness and honesty. 

A single farmer to-day is no match for the 
corporations, railroads and business enterprises 
with which he must deal. Organized into co- 
operative associations, however, the farmers' 
power would be enormously increased. The prin- 
ciple upon which such cooperative groups are 
formed is very simple. The profits are divided 
partly in the shape of a rebate that is paid in 
proportion to the volume of business done for 
each member. The control, however, of the asso- 

200 



THE FARMER 

ciation does not depend upon the number of 
shares that a member may own but rests upon 
the democratic basis of one man, one vote. In 
such associations they elect their own officers who 
are specifically qualified to deal with the agricul- 
tural problems of the association. These officers 
are subject to the direct control of those whose 
business and interests they handle. In this way 
politics is kept out of the farmer's business. 
Through cooperative organization our farmers 
can build up their strength. 

And normally they can do better in this way 
than by recourse to an extreme form of state 
Socialism. The farmers of Denmark, Holland 
(and parts of France, North Italy and Ger- 
many) have pointed the way. In Denmark on 
a country road in the afternoon one can see a 
man wearing the cap of the cooperative asso- 
ciation push a light wagon through the vil- 
lage, gathering from each house a dozen or two 
dozen eggs and a roll of butter and cheese. As 
he takes it he stamps the eggs and records the 
quantity delivered in the record book of the 
member. At the end of his three- or four-mile 
trip he meets a half-dozen other men at a small 
transfer station owned by the cooperative as- 
sociation. There wagons or trucks load the 
products brought in and haul them to a nearby 
railroad station where the trucks from five or 

20I 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

six transfer stations gather and fill a railroad 
car. The railroad car starts and in its journey 
to the seaport meets several dozen additional 
cars loaded with the products of the association. 
At the seaport a ship load is waiting and the en- 
tire train load of products is loaded and started 
for England. In England this ship is unloaded 
in the warehouse of an English cooperative asso- 
ciation. The products — ^butter, eggs, cheese, milk 
and other standard farm outputs — have been con- 
tracted for on a sliding scale on a yearly basis 
in advance. Between the peasant farmer of 
Denmark and the working man consumer in 
London there is no middleman. Handling 
charges are reduced to the minimum. The gain 
goes to the producer in the shape of almost the 
full price and to the consumer in the shape of 
reduced cost. The cooperative farmers asso- 
ciation of Denmark buys saltpetre and nitrates 
in Chili by the ship load, and distributes them as 
they are unloaded in carload lots to the co- 
operative associations in every village at a 
handling charge that is almost insignificantly 
small. This is the right way for farmers to 
organize. 

Examples of what is done in foreign lands 
are of great use ; yet we must always adapt them 
to our own needs, and not merely copy them; 
for no scheme of national betterment can suc- 

202 



THE FARMER 

ceed unless it takes into account national charac- 
teristics. Experiments in our own country 
therefore have a peculiar guidance value for us. 
For this reason those interested in the problem 
of farm life can well afford to pay some atten- 
tion to what is at this moment being done in 
the Sandhill district of central North Carolina. 

This is a district of sandy, and rather easily 
exhausted, soil. It was settled in the middle of 
the eighteenth century, chiefly by Highland 
Scotch. It was then covered with valuable pine 
forest, and there was good, natural pasture. The 
people worked at lumbering and raised cattle. 
Gradually the timber was cut off, and the wild 
pasture grazed out — in our usual wasteful 
fashion. A rather poor type of tillage was left 
— cotton and tobacco being the best crops. The 
people were of fine stock; but the schools were 
poor, the land was poor, the methods of farming 
were poor, the roads were bad, life was hard 
and flattened and joyless, and there was no idea 
of cooperation among the farmers — or indeed 
among the townsmen. 

Then, a score of years ago, there began to be 
an uneasy consciousness that things were going 
backward rather than forward, and that some 
joint effort must be made or there would be com- 
plete dry rot. The effort was begun, with the 
usual preliminary struggles and failures. En- 

203 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

thusiastic reformers attempted to better matters 
by wrong-headed action; and "hard-headed, 
practical men" sourly refused to take part in 
any action at all. But gradually leaders were 
developed. Gradually wisdom grew out of the 
soil of disheartening experience. 

The first concerted effort at joint action, made 
under the lead of half a dozen public-spirited 
citizens, was an attempted organization confined 
to the farmers — the cotton, fruit and tobacco 
growers. The objects were to solve the market- 
ing problem, to devise a system of rural credit for 
the small farmer, and to spread better knowledge 
of agricultural methods. This effort failed, one 
prime cause of the failure being the fact that the 
townspeople of the section, the merchants and 
business men who were in reality just as vitally 
interested in the agricultural prosperity of the 
section as the farmers themselves, were not 
asked to join. They had more ready money 
than the farmers, they were more accustomed 
to act together and were better acquainted with 
the outside world, and it was found that their 
help was essential. 

So the organization was transformed into a 
Board of Trade, which was pledged to promote 
the development of the section as a whole and 
the interests of all classes of its citizens. It is 
composed of farmers, merchants, doctors — all 

204 



THE FARMER 

the leading citizens. By its activities it has 
shown that it represents the organized Sandhill 
community, covering an area as large as Rhode 
Island and having a population of some ten 
thousand souls. 

The Board of Trade works in practical fash- 
ion; which means that while it tries to educate 
the people to their real needs, it also commands 
their confidence by meeting the — usually less im- 
portant — needs to which they are fully awake. 
Therefore it advertises fully — but honestly — the 
advantages of the Sandhills region for settlers 
and has been instrumental in getting a number 
to come in. If it did only this it would be no 
more important than a thousand other local ad- 
vertising committees. If it did not do this, it 
would soon cease to appeal to the ordinary man, 
and would sink into the well-meaning impotence 
of so many "high brow" associations for a 
species of uplift which the average man does 
not regard as practical. This board is a prac- 
tical organization with intelligently high pur- 
poses. No organization can last long enough 
even to make a beginning in doing practical 
good to the people unless it is practical; and 
unless it actually functions instead of confining 
itself to manifestos and advice. Great is the 
persuasive power of concrete action! 

The people of the district are working out 

205 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

the two problems of schools and health work. 
These two problems are, of course, themselves 
merely portions of the great problem of secur- 
ing in our struggling, individualistic country 
democracy the proper regulation by coherent 
community cooperation and self-control. In 
other words, our affair is to get our democracy 
to discipline itself; a difficult task, but essential 
to perform if we are to become a really great 
nation. 

The Derby Memorial School in the Sandhills 
represents the consolidation of three small, strug- 
gling backwoods schools. There are now over 
150 pupils in the school; those that live more than 
two and one-half miles away are transported in 
cheap motors at a cost of eight cents per child per 
day. The school is an excellent school — ^not mark- 
edly different from other first-class country 
schools in different country regions. There is a 
school paper, edited by the pupils; the girls set 
the type and the boys do the printing. There is 
a library of 1,200 volumes, used as much by the 
older people of the community as by the children 
— and it speaks well for the taste of the commun- 
ity that "Treasure Island'' is on the whole the 
most popular book. Not much has been done 
in the w^ay of vocational training, for the com- 
munity is conservative and is wedded to old- 
fashioned book learning; but the school is being 

206 



THE FARMER 

used more and more as a community center, and 
shows what important assets schools can become 
in neighborhood betterment. 

The Sandhill Farm Life School is an agri- 
cultural school, started by the Board of Trade, 
under the state law. The principles of this 
school are: (i) That the children shall be 
trained primarily for life in the country, not by 
books simply, but by actually doing the various 
things at school that they will be called upon to 
do in later life. (2) That the school shall turn 
out good citizens, taught to cooperate, and with 
a sense of obligation to their community and 
their nation. Both these ends are being measur- 
ably achieved. 

There are eighty scholars in the school. All 
the work is done by the boys and girls them- 
selves. The boys are under military discipline. 
They dress in khaki, they belong to a rifle club, 
they drill. Their instructor was at a Platts- 
burg camp. Some of the boys were at the 
Plum Island camp last year. The boys do all the 
work of the farm, which deals chiefly with animal 
industry; and they fire the furnaces, cut wood, 
build the roads, etc. There is some theoretical 
agriculture and laboratory work; but the em- 
phasis is placed on actually doing the job. The 
school is not an institution of ''higher learning.'' 
It is not intended to turn out boys who will seek 

207 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

clerkships or become school teachers. The 
effort is to turn out farmers who will farm. 

As regards the girls, the effort is to turn out 
first-class farmers' wives. They are all dressed 
in uniforms which they made themselves. They 
are given a setting-up drill which has proved 
most beneficial. They do all the housework and 
cooking, learning by actual practice to do it 
efficiently and economically. In the kitchen they 
use the implements of the kind they will have in 
their own houses — not those used in large hotels. 
They work hard, but not to the point of 
drudgery and exhaustion; and in the evenings 
there is singing, dancing, games or lectures. 
Surely this is a school along the right lines! 

One of the things with which the Board of 
Trade has grappled is the health problem. As 
in so many country communities the health of 
the children is below par. Half of them have 
hookworm; and there are other common com- 
plaints. Some day or other we shall follow 
Germany's lead in having the Government take 
care of the health of the ordinary citizen — and 
of his welfare in other respects also — in return 
for requiring from him training and service to 
the state in time of war. At present our physical 
efficiency is low compared with that of Ger- 
many; and private organizations have to 

208 



THE FARMER 

partially make good the failure of governmental 
action. 

Three years ago the board instituted fairs, 
the first ever held in the region. A local paper, 
the Pinehurst Outlook, describes one of the 
fairs: There were bands; and parties of girl 
dancers — an unusual and very pretty feature; 
and the boy scouts and the boys who had been 
at the Plum Island camp paraded in company 
with the Confederate Veterans, all escorting the 
national flag. Everything was by home talent; 
there wasn't an imported show in the whole fair. 
Then there were the usual county fair exhibits; 
and the girls' canning clubs, and the boys' pig 
and corn clubs — all managed by the girls and 
boys who had actually done the work. And 
there was an exhibition by booths of what the 
community expected to become; a credit union 
booth, a cooperative sire owners' association 
booth, a county hospital booth, a consolidated 
school booth, etc., etc. 

The Board of Trade does not merely write 
manifestos. It reduces its preaching to prac- 
tice. In the fall of 19 14 cotton went to six cents 
a pound, and the situation in the South became 
critical. Every form of wild relief scheme was 
suggested. But the Sandhill Board of Trade 
acted with equal energy and common sense. It 
borrowed $100,000 in Boston, built warehouses 

209 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

at various points in the section and loaned the 
money on cotton warehouse receipts at eight 
cents per pound and six per cent, interest. Col- 
lateral was provided by patriotic members of 
the community. It was a striking case of united 
community action for mutual self-protection; 
something peculiarly needed in the South, and 
a long step toward the cooperative spirit and 
away from the "every man for himself and the 
community be damned" spirit. 

The board employs a secretary, who is also 
a farm demonstrator-agent for the whole sec- 
tion — a farmer's boy, the son of a poor Kansas 
farmer, who has worked his way through col- 
lege, and knows his subject from the ground up 
no less than from above down. In a recent paper 
this gentleman put what he was striving to do 
so well, and what he says is so applicable to so 
many country communities that I can not for- 
bear quoting it: 

"Whenever the late Marcus Tully Cicero 
emptied the Roman Senate in order to fill a 
modern text-book, he usually devoted a con- 
siderable part of his speech to matters which 
he said, T shall pass over in silence.' You have 
asked me to talk about the use of the local paper 
in community development. I think I have 
something to say about the use of the local 
paper; but just what to do in order to develop 

210 



THE FARMER 

a community is a subject that 'I shall pass over 
in silence.' We Sandhillers are making prog- 
ress, and much that we are doing is, we trust, 
worthy of being put into operation elsewhere. 
If any of you care to know just what we think 
most worth doing for the development of our 
section, I will be glad to give you a copy of a 
circular letter written to the members of the 
Sandhill Board of Trade. From it you will learn 
that we divide our work into two parts. The 
first is the stimulating of immigration by means 
of advertising. To get our section before the 
eyes of prospective buyers we have used booklets, 
magazines, lectures, lantern slides, and exhibits. 
The second and more important part of our 
work is to prevent emigration by making our 
community a place which people cannot afford 
to leave. The first step toward the accomplish- 
ment of this is to work out more profitable 
methods of crop production, less expensive ways 
of marketing, and all else that makes for pros- 
perity, for as wise old Dr. Knapp persistently 
pointed out, without prosperity all else must 
fail. But this is not enough. The philosophy 
of the belly will never get a community very 
far. Statistics prove this, for we find that 
where farm and village people are making 
money the fastest there they are going to 
the cities the fastest, because in the cities they 

211 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

find schools, household comforts, entertainment, 
society, and other things for which they wish to 
spend their money while they are well; and 
when they are sick in the cities they can find 
something more than antediluvian hospital 
facilities at something less than multi-millionaire 
prices. That is why we are working so hard 
to improve our rural schools, build up a suc- 
cessful farm life school, establish our hospital, 
get public health work going, and to do all else 
that is mentioned in this circular letter, and 
which I, like Cicero, now that I have stated the 
matter pretty fully, 'shall not mention but shall 
pass over in silence/ " 

The secretary, assisted by the county agent, 
gives many lectures with a stereopticon at the 
schools, thereby meeting inadvertently one of 
the greatest needs of Southern country life — 
the need for social life and amusement. They 
organize those practical children's agricultural 
clubs — girls' poultry clubs, boys' pig and corn 
clubs, and the like — which are such forces in the 
development of the South, where livestock is a 
necessity to a perfectly balanced farming system, 
while few farmers can make a success of handling 
livestock unless they have begun as boys. Soil im- 
provement is, of course, one prime object — and 
the secretary is really applying his ideas, which, 
I am sorry to say, is too often not the case with 

212 



THE FARMER 

theoretically excellent farm demonstration work. 
In farming the theoretical man can often help 
the practical man — but if he is merely a theorist, 
even although a very well trained theorist, he is 
much more apt to be wrong than the practical 
man he starts in to educate. Yet there must 
be men of vision to lead. In the South the ex- 
clusively ^^practical" man has gone in for "all 
cotton'' farming; and "all cotton" means a sub- 
merged civilization. 

The secretary has also organized two credit 
unions which are working successfully, one at 
the Derby school and one at the Sandhill Farm 
Life School. Under the North Carolina Credit 
Union law the farmers can organize associa- 
tions very similar to the Raffeissen Credit 
Unions of Germany. The treasurer of the 
one at the Derby school writes me as follows: 
"We have loaned out to the farmers this sum- 
mer about $400 of their own money. The 
whole community is tied together on each other's 
notes. Each man who owns stock or has de- 
posits in the union takes a pretty vital interest 
in the kind of farming that the men who have 
borrowed money are doing. It is simply ap- 
plying the Christian principle to actual life, 
*Am I my brother's keeper?' You certainly are 
if you are a member of a credit union and have 
gone on his note for money to buy a hog with. 

213 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

It is your business to see that he buys a good 
hog and feeds it properly and doesn't waste the 
money on an organ or a graphophone, for if he 
doesn't succeed, then the community and you 
don't succeed. 

"This fall all the loans of my credit union are 
being paid promptly and in full. I find that the 
farmers consider their obligations to the credit 
union of the first importance. For next year 
we are buying fertilizer cooperatively on money 
borrowed by the credit union. The farmers are 
only paying six per cent, for their loans. In 
buying from the fertilizer companies they were 
paying from ten per cent, to forty per cent. I 
never thought the credit unions would work in 
this individualistic society but I am now con- 
vinced that if people of education and with the 
desire to lead will take off their coats and get 
down and fight the battles of the people out with 
them, almost anything can be made to suc- 
ceed." 

The section stands well in roads, thanks to 
a leading citizen who combined vision and 
common sense. He built the first sand- 
clay road, of a type which is both cheap and 
serviceable. The first section was built for 
a quarter of a mile parallel to an old sand road. 
Then he gave a barbecue to the neighbors; 
loaded a wagon with more cotton than anybody 

214 



THE FARMER 

present had ever seen pulled by a team before, 
and sent it up the sand-clay road. The horses 
pulled it easily; but as soon as it ended and 
they reached the sand road they came to a dead 
halt. This practical demonstration won the 
day, and the section is now covered by real 
roads, built by the people themselves. 

What is being done in the Sandhill district 
along this line is being done on genuinely 
patriotic grounds. Those who have taken the 
lead frankly say that they are interested less 
from the mondial-humanitarian than from the 
national-American standpoint. As one of them 
has expressed it, "I want to play on a strong 
team and I want my team — the United States — 
to win when it comes to a showdown." 

The Board of Trade has arranged with the 
State Board of Health for a complete medical 
examination of all the school children. It has 
built at the Farm Life School a hospital with 
two six-bed wards, an operating room, and 
equipment. It has employed a competent resi- 
dent nurse — and she is assisted by the school 
girls, who thus learn the rudiments of nursing. 
It has aided the doctors of the Sandhills to 
organize a hospital staff; and a marked impetus 
has been given the medical and surgical work 
of the district. The hospital is not a charitable 
institution; it is run on the theory that it is to 

^15 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

be self-supporting, and that every patient must 
pay something. 

One of the most active organizers and 
promoters of this Sandhill work has recently 
summed it up as follows: 

"Our organization, such as it is, has many 
defects and we have had many failures and 
many disappointments. We have not accom- 
plished half of what we set out to accomplish. 
But we have done two things. We have in- 
spired in the people of this section a spirit of 
real cooperation that is rare everywhere in our 
country, and perhaps especially rare in the 
South. We have succeeded in making them 
see the advantage of pulling together and oc- 
casionally sacrificing themselves and their in- 
terests for the welfare of the community. That 
only a few men have done most of the leading 
is only natural. Only a few will lead under any 
circumstances. It is the number that will fol- 
low that counts. We have also imposed on the 
community certain institutions that eventually 
will be of great benefit to it and which the 
people will eventually support in full. In my 
estimation we have gone quite far in making a 
democratic community discipline itself. We 
endeavor to make our people more prosperous, 
with fuller, happier lives; but above all we en- 

216 



THE FARMER 

deavor to make them less selfish and readier 
to sacrifice themselves for an ideal/' 

This is the spirit, both practical and lofty, 
deferential both to common sense and to 
idealism, considerate of both one's own needs 
and of those of one's fellows, in which we should 
approach the problems of our farming popula- 
tion — and all our other problems also. 



217 



CHAPTER X 

THE WORD OF MICAH ; THE RELIGION OF SERVICE 

V)17HEN our troops made ready to sail across 
the seas the New York Bible Society dis- 
tributed among them little Pocket Testaments, 
and asked me to write a message which should 
go with each Testament. I wrote as follows: 

"The teachings of the New Testament are 
foreshadowed in Micah's verse: 'What more 
doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
God/ 

"Do justice; and therefore fight valiantly 
against the armies of Germany and Turkey, for 
these nations in this crisis stand for the reign 
of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth. 

"Love mercy; treat prisoners well; succor the 
wounded ; treat every woman as if she were your 
sister; care for the little children, and be tender 
with the old and helpless. 

"Walk humbly; you will do so if you study 
the life and teachings of the Savior. 

"May the God of Justice and Mercy have you 
in His keeping.'' 

2X8 



THE WORD OF MICAH 

The most perfect machinery of government 
will not keep us as a nation from destruction 
if there is not within us a soul. No abounding 
material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual 
senses atrophy. The foes of our own house- 
hold shall surely prevail against us unless there 
be in our people an inner life which finds its 
outward expression in a morality not very 
widely dififerent from that preached by the seers 
and prophets of Judea when the grandeur that 
was Greece and the glory that was Rome still 
lay in the future. 

In his Farewell Address to his countrymen, 
Washington said: "Morality is a necessary 
spring of popular government . . . and let 
us with caution indulge the supposition that 
morality can be maintained without religion. 
Whatever may be conceded to the influence of 
refined education on minds of peculiar structure, 
reason and experience both forbid us to expect 
that national morality can prevail in exclusion 
of religious principle." 

Washington lacked Lincoln's gift of words; 
but not Lincoln himself possessed more robust 
common sense in the thought that lies back of 
words. In this case the thought is not new — 
only a few good thoughts are new; but it was 
given expression at a time when the European 
movement with which the American people were 

219 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

in most complete sympathy — the French Revo- 
lution — had endeavored to destroy the abuses 
of priestcraft and bigotry by abolishing not only 
Christianity but religion, in the sense in which 
religion is properly understood. The result was 
a cynical disregard of morality and a carnival 
of cruelty and bigotry, committed in the names 
of reason and liberty, which equalled anything 
ever done by Torquemada and the fanatics of 
the Inquisition in the names of religion and 
order. Washington wished his fellow country- 
men to walk clear of such folly and iniquity. 
As in all cases where he dealt with continuing 
causes his words are as well worth ponder- 
ing now as when they were written. 

Washington was certainly not thinking of 
dogmatic theology; and still less need we lay 
much emphasis upon it when we speak of the 
need of religion in our national life. How do 
I define religion? I use the term as it is used 
in Boutroux's "Science and Religion,'' in Bade's 
"The Old Testament in the Light of To-day." 
But I am not thinking primarily of the philoso- 
phers, or of those who, in Washington's phrase, 
possess "minds of peculiar structure." I am 
thinking of the rest of us, of those of whom 
Washington thought when he demanded a na- 
tional morality based on religious principles. I 
am thinking of the mass of the men who make 

220 



THE WORD OF MICAH 

up this nation, who toil in time of peace and 
fight in time of war, and of the women who are 
their wives and helpmeets, and who toil and 
suffer and are brave and know the joy of life, 
as they go through the years beside their men. 

These men and wornen profess many differ- 
ent creeds; and perhaps the priceless boon we 
have won here in America is the entire freedom 
to lead each the spiritual life which is demanded 
by his or her conscience, and to seek truth as 
that conscience demands. Yet normally a man 
can work best when he works with his fellows; 
and in religious matters this means that he must 
ordinarily find the outlet for his power and his 
sympathies, and the satisfaction for his spiritual 
hunger, in some church, whether that church be 
Protestant or Catholic, or as separate from most 
institutions of recognized orthodoxy as Charles 
Stelzle's Labor Temple or Felix Adler's Ethical 
Culture School. 

In this actual world a churchless community, 
a community where men have abandoned and 
scoff at or ignore their religious needs, is a 
community on the rapid down grade. It is true 
that occasional individuals or families may have 
nothing to do with church or with religious prac- 
tices and observances and yet maintain the high- 
est standard of refined ethical obligation. But this 
does not affect the case in the world as it now is, 

221 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

any more than the fact that exceptional men and 
women under exceptional conditions have dis- 
regarded the marriage tie without moral harm 
to themselves interferes with the larger fact that 
such disregard if at all common means the com- 
plete moral disintegration of the body politic. 
In the pioneer days of the West we found it 
an unfailing rule that after a community had 
existed for a certain length of time either a 
church was built or else the community began 
to go down hill. In those old communities in 
the Eastern States which have gone backward, 
it is noticeable that the retrogression has been 
both marked by and accentuated by a rapid de- 
cline in church membership and work; the two 
facts being so interrelated that each stands to 
the other partly as a cause and partly as an 
effect. This has occurred not only in the "poor 
white" communities of the South, but in the 
small hamlets of the "abandoned farm" region 
of New England and New York. As the people 
grow slack and dispirited they slip from all ef- 
fective interest in church activities; and on the 
other hand, the building up of a strong country 
church or Young Men's Christian Association 
in such a community often has an astonishing 
effect in putting such virile life into them that 
their moral betterment stimulates a marked 
physical betterment in their homes and farms. 

222 



THE WORD OF MICAH 

For all those whose lives are led on a plane 
above the grimmest and barest struggle for ex- 
istence church attendance and church work of 
some kind mean both the cultivation of the habit 
of feeling some responsibility for others and 
the sense of braced moral strength which pre- 
vents a relaxation of one's own fiber. 

That man is unfortunate who has not owed 
much, in teaching and in companionship, to hard- 
working priest or hard-working parson. In my 
own experience I recall priest after priest whose 
disinterested parish work has represented one 
continuous battle for civilization and humanity. 
Out of my own experience I recall case after 
case where the clergyman and his wife — who 
have themselves enjoyed no rest on Sunday — 
are engaged all the week long in a series of 
wearing and important and humdrum tasks for 
making hard lives a little easier and gray lives 
a little brighter; and both this man and this 
woman, in the vast majority of cases, are en- 
gaged in constant self-denial, are doing much 
for humble folk, of whom few of us think, and 
are keeping up a brave show on narrow means. 
Surely the average man ought to sympathize 
with such work and help such workers; and he 
cannot do this if his attitude is merely that of 
an unsympathetic outsider. 

The church must fit itself for the practical 

223 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

betterment of mankind if it is to attract and re- 
tain the fealty of the men best worth holding 
and using. The betterment may come in many 
ways. The great exhorter or preacher, the priest 
or clergyman or rabbi, the cardinal or bishop or 
revivalist or Salvation Army commander, may, by 
sheer fervor and intensity, and by kindling some 
flame of the spirit which mystics have long known 
to be real and which scientists now admit to be 
real, rouse numbed conscience to life and 
free seared souls from sin; and then the roused 
conscience and the freed soul will teach the 
bodies in which they dwell how to practice the 
great law of service. But such stormy awaken- 
ing of the spirit, though often of high useful- 
ness, loses all savor unless, in the times of calm 
which follow on the storm, the workaday body 
makes good in its round of life and labor the 
promise given by the spirit in its hour of stress. 
Far more often the betterment must come 
through work which does not depend on the gift 
of tongues; that is, through consistently per- 
sistent labor conducted with wary wisdom no 
less than with broad humanity. This may take 
the old form of individual service to the indi- 
vidual; of visiting and comforting the widow 
and the fatherless and the sore-stricken; of per- 
sonal sympathy and personal aid. It may take 

224 



THE WORD OF MICAH 

the form of organized philanthropy— a form not 
merely beneficial but absolutely essential where 
a dense population increases the mass of suffer- 
ing and also the mass of imposture and of that 
weakness of will which, if permitted, becomes 
parasitic helplessness; but a form which needs 
incessant supervision lest it lose all vitality and 
become empty and stereotyped so as finally to 
amount to little except a method of giving 
salaries to those administering the charity. 

Under the tense activity of modern social and 
industrial conditions the church, if it is to give 
real leadership, must grapple zealously, fear- 
lessly and cool-headedly with the problems of 
social and industrial justice. Unless it is the 
poor man's church it is not a Christian church 
at all in any real sense. The rich man needs it, 
heaven knows; and is needed by it. But, un- 
less in the church he can work with all his toil- 
ing brothers for a common end, for their mutual 
benefit and for the benefit of those without its 
walls, the church has come short of its mission 
and its possibilities. Unless the church in a 
mining town or factory town or railway center 
is a leading force in the effort to secure cleaner 
and more wholesome surroundings, moral and 
physical, for the people, unless it concerns itself 
with their living and working conditions, with 
their workshops and houses and playgrounds, 

225 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

with their chance to open a cleft upward into the 
Hfe of full development^ it has forfeited its right 
to the foremost place in the regard of men. By 
their fruits shall ye know them! We judge a 
man nowadays by his conduct rather than by his 
dogma. And, to keep its hold on mankind the 
church must, as in its early days, obey the great 
law of service ; for it shall not live by ceremonial 
and by dogmatic theology alone. 

There are plenty of clergymen of all denom- 
inations who do obey this law; they render in- 
estimable service. Yet these men can do but 
little unless keen, able, zealous laymen give them 
aid; and this aid is beyond comparison most 
effective when rendered by men and women who 
are themselves active participants in the work 
of the church. It was aid thus rendered which 
enabled Dr. Rainsford to give St. George's 
Church a leadership in service which at the 
time was equalled by no other Protestant 
Church in New York City; it is aid thus 
rendered which has rendered the St. Vin- 
cent de Paul Society, when it is under the 
lead of a man like Judge de Lacy of Washing- 
ton, a potent force against the "foes of our own 
household." Such churches and church organi- 
zations foster a fine feeling of fellowship. 
Surely if our churches are not democratic the 
root of the matter is not in us; and therefore 

226 



THE WORD OF MICAH 

the church is beyond all other places that in 
which men of every social grade and degree 
of wealth should come together on a footing of 
brotherhood and of equality of rights and obli- 
gations. There, arrogance and envy are equally 
out of place ; there, every sincere man should feel 
stirred to exceptional effort to see questions at 
issue as his brother sees them, and to act toward 
that brother as he would wish, under reversed 
conditions, the brother to act toward him. 
Surely half of our labor troubles would disap- 
pear if a sufficient number of the leaders on 
both sides had worked for common ends in the 
same churches and religious organizations, and 
approached one another's positions with an 
earnest desire to understand them and respect 
them. 

One important thing for the layman inter- 
ested in church work to do is to make the church 
an instrument for securing the healthy happi- 
ness of young people. The influence of the 
Puritan has been most potent for strength and 
for virtue in our national life. But his somber 
austerity left one evil: the tendency to confound 
pleasure and vice, a tendency which, in the end, 
is much more certain to encourage vice than 
to discourage pleasure — a tendency especially 
strong among the rigid formalists, including 
the ultra-sabbatarian formalists, who remain 

227 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

true only to what is least desirable in Puri- 
tanism. 

Let every layman interested in church work 
battle against this tendency. Let him proceed 
on the assumption that innocent pleasure which 
does not interfere with things even more de- 
sirable is in itself a good; that this is as true of 
one day of the week as of another ; and that one 
function of the church should be the en- 
couragement of happiness in small things as 
well as in large. No general rules can be laid 
down in such a matter; the customs and feelings 
and peculiar conditions of each community must 
be taken into account and so far as possible re- 
spected. Therefore I can on this point speak 
only of my own experience. I have known a 
village baseball nine, which, because after church 
on Sunday afternoons it held games in a field a 
mile away, was a potent help in keeping young 
men out of the "blind pig" saloons. It is only 
very backward church organizations that now 
object to music. But many good people still 
put dancing under a ban. I believe that danc- 
ing, like all other healthy and proper pastimes, 
should be encouraged in the parish house; 
and this because I dread the professional dance 
hall, where liquor can be obtained and where 
foolish girls go with foohsh or vicious young 
men, while there are no older men and women 

228 



THE WORD OF MICAH 

to look after them. If the natural desire of 
young people for pleasure is not given a healthy 
outlet it is only too apt to find an unhealthy 
outlet. 

If good people feel that in what I have said 
I have slurred dogma and unduly exalted con- 
duct, I am sorry; but each man must bear tes- 
timony as his soul bids; and the teachings to 
which I turn are those which impress this 
lesson. 

Isaiah, the seer, the man of the vision, con- 
demned ritual and formalism, and exalted con- 
duct, when he thundered: "Hear the word of 
the Lord; to what purpose is the multitude of 
your sacrifices unto me? I delight not in the 
blood of bullocks. Your appointed feasts my 
soul hateth. Cease to do evil; learn to do well; 
seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the 
fatherless, plead for the widow." 

Amos — no son of a prophet, but a laboring 
man, a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore 
fruit — said: ''Hear ye the Word; I despise 
your feast days; I will not accept your burnt 
offerings. But let judgment run down as 
waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream; 
hate the evil, and love the good, and establish 
judgment in the gate." What is this but in- 
sistence on the great law of service? In peace 
and in war we must spend and be spent, in the 

229 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

endless battle for right against wrong; deeds, 
not words, alone shall save us. 

"By their fruits ye shall know them," is a 
teaching of the Sermon on the Mount; and 
James, spurning the unctuous professions of 
righteousness by those who do not make good 
what they preach, by those who profess a faith 
which is dead — which was never alive — ^because 
it bears no fruit in works, sums up the matter by 
insisting that we must be doers and not hearers 
only, because "Pure religion and undefiled be- 
fore God and the Father is this, to visit the 
fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to 
keep oneself unspotted from the world." 

I know not how philosophers may ultimately 
define religion; but from Micah to James it has 
been defined as service to one's fellow men ren- 
dered by following the great rule of justice and 
mercy, of wisdom and righteousness. 



'30 



CHAPTER XI 

THE PARASITE WOMAN; THE ONLY INDIS- 
PENSABLE CITIZEN 

QF all species of silliness the silliest is the 
assertion sometimes made that the woman 
whose primary life-work is taking care of her 
home and children is somehow a "parasite 
woman." It is such a ridiculous inversion of 
the truth that it ought not to be necessary even 
to allude to it. Nevertheless, it is acted upon by 
a large number of selfish, brutal or thoughtless 
men, and it is screamed about by a number of 
foolish women. Therefore a word of common 
sense on the matter may not be out of place. 

There are men so selfish, so short-sighted or 
so brutal, that they speak and act as if the fact 
of the man's earning money for his wife and 
children, while the woman bears the children, 
rears them and takes care of the house for 
them and for the man, somehow entitles the 
man to be known as the head of the family, in- 
stead of a partner on equal terms with his wife, 
and entitles him to the exclusive right to dispose 
of the money and, as a matter of fact, to dispose 
of it primarily in his own interest. 

231 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

There are professional feminists and so-called 
woman's-rights women who, curiously enough, 
seem to accept so much of this male attitude as 
implies that the partner who earns the money is 
the superior partner and that therefore the 
woman, who is physically weaker than the man, 
should accept as her primary duty the rivaling 
of him in the money-making business in which 
he will normally do better than she will; and 
they stigmatize as parasites the women who -do 
the one great and all-essential work, without 
which no other activity by either sex amounts to 
anything. 

Apply common sense and common decency to 
both attitudes. It is entirely right that any 
woman should be allowed to make any career 
for herself of which she is capable, whether or 
not it is a career followed by a man. She has 
the same right to be a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer 
or a storekeeper that the man has to be a poet, 
an explorer, a politician or a painter. There 
are women whose peculiar circumstances or 
whose peculiar attributes render it advisable 
that they should follow one of the professions 
named, just as there are men who can do most 
good to their fellows by following one of the 
careers above indicated for men. More than 
this. It is indispensable that such careers shall 
be open to women and that certain women shall 

232 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

follow them, if the women of a country, and 
therefore if the country itself, expect any de- 
velopment. In just the same way, it is indis- 
pensable that some men shall be explorers, 
artists, sculptors, literary men, politicians, if 
the country is to have its full life. Some of the 
best farmers are women just as some of the 
best exploring work and scientific work has been 
done by women. There is a real need for a cer- 
tain number of women doctors and women 
lawyers. Whether a writer or a painter or a 
singer is a man or a woman makes not the 
slightest difference, provided that the work he 
or she does is good. 

All this I not merely admit; I insist upon it. 
But surely it is a mere statement of fact to add 
that the primary work of the average man and 
the average woman — and of all exceptional men 
and women whose lives are to be really full and 
happy — must be the great primal work of home- 
making and home-keeping, for themselves and 
their children. 

The primary work of the man is to earn his 
own livelihood and the livelihood of those de- 
pendent upon him, to do his own business, 
whether his business is on a farm or in a shop, 
in the counting-room of a bank or the engine- 
cab of a train, in a mine or on a fishing- 
boat, or at the head of a telegraph or tele- 

233 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

phone line; whether he be an engineer or an 
inventor, a surgeon or a railway president, 
or a carpenter or a brakeman. In other 
words, the man must do his business and do it 
well in order to support himself and his wife 
and children and in order that the nation may 
continue to exist. I appreciate to the full the 
work of the politician, the poet, the sculptor and 
the explorer; and yet it is mere common sense 
to say that they cannot do any work at all un- 
less their average fellow countryman does his 
business, whether with hand or brain, pen or 
pick, in such fashion that the country is on a 
decent industrial basis. If it is not, nobody will 
have any house or anything to eat or any means 
of getting around; and therefore there won't 
be any poets or politicians. This is not exalting 
one class at the expense of another. On the con- 
trary, it recognizes the absolute need from the 
standpoint of national greatness and permanent 
achievement, that there shall be some men in 
a state the worth of whose activities cannot be 
and is not measured or expressed by money. 
But there is also the absolute need that this shall 
not be true of the average man — and, as a mat- 
ter of fact, it is a great deal better even if it is 
not true of the exceptional man — if, in addition 
to his non-remunerative work, he is able by 
his activities to pay his way as he goes. 

234 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

Now, this also applies to women. Excep- 
tional women — like Julia Ward Howe or Har- 
riet Beecher Stowe or Mrs. Homer — are ad- 
mirable wives and mothers, admirable keepers 
of the home, and yet workers of genius outside 
the home. Such types, of course, are rare 
whether among men or women. There are 
also exceptional — and less happy, and normally 
less useful — women whose great service to the 
state and community is rendered outside the 
home, and who have no family life; just as is 
true of exceptional — and normally less happy and 
less useful — men. But exactly as it is true that 
no nation will prosper unless the average man is 
a home-maker ; that is, unless at some business or 
trade or profession, he earns enough to make a 
home for himself and his wife and children, and 
is a good husband and father; so no nation can 
exist at all unless the average woman is the home- 
keeper, the good wife, and unless she is the 
mother of a sufficient number of healthy children 
to insure the race going forward and not back- 
ward. The indispensable work for the com- 
munity is the work of the wife and the mother. 
It is the most honorable work. It is literally and 
exactly the vital work, the work which of course 
must be done by the average woman or the 
whole nation goes down with a crash. 

Foolish men treat this fact as warranting 

235 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

them in all kinds of outcries against what they 
call "unwomanly'' activities, including the out- 
cry against the "higher education." This is 
nonsense. The woman is entitled to just as 
much education as the man; and it will not hurt 
her one particle more than it hurts the man. 
It may hurt a fool in either case; but no one 
else. However, justification is given these peo- 
ple who cry against the "higher education" by 
such utterances as those made the other day by 
a president of a women's college who fatuously 
announced, in advocacy of a small birthrate, 
that it was better to have one child brought up 
in the best way than several not thus brought 
up. In the first place, there is no such antithesis 
as is thus implied, for, as a matter of fact, chil- 
dren in a family of children are usually better 
brought up than the only child, or than the 
child of a two-child family. In the next place, 
the statement, which must of course be taken 
to apply to the average individual, is on its face 
false, and the woman making it is not only unfit 
to be at the head of a female college, but is not 
fit to teach the lowest class in a kindergarten, 
for such teaching is not merely folly, but a 
peculiarly repulsive type of mean and selfish 
wickedness. The one-child family as an average 
ideal of course spells death; and death means 
the end of all hope. It is only while there is 

236 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

life that there is hope. A caste or a race or a 
nation, where the average family consists of one 
child, faces immediate extinction, and therefore 
it matters not one particle how this child is 
brought up. But if there are plenty of children 
then there is always hope. Even if they have 
not been very well brought up, they have been 
brought up; and so there is something to work 
on. 

Just as the prime work for the average man 
must be earning his livelihood and the livelihood 
of those dependent upon him, so the prime work 
for the average woman must be keeping the 
home and bearing and rearing her children. 
This woman is not a parasite on society. She 
is society. She is the one indispensable com- 
ponent part of society. Socially, the same 
standard of moral obligation applies both to her 
and to the man; and in addition she is entitled 
to all the chivalry of love and tenderness and 
reverence, if in gallant and fearless' fashion she 
faces the risk and wearing labor entailed by 
her fulfilment of duty; but if she shirks her duty 
she is entitled to no more consideration than the 
man who shirks his. Unless she does her duty, 
the whole social system collapses. If she does 
her duty, she is entitled to all honor. 

This last statement is the crucial statement. 
The one way to honor this indispensable woman, 

237 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

the wife and mother, is to insist that she be 
treated as the full equal of her husband. The 
birth pangs make all men the debtors of all 
women; and the man is a wretched creature 
who does not live up to this obligation. Mar- 
riage should be a real partnership; a partner- 
ship of the soul, the spirit and the mind, no less 
than of the body. An immediately practical 
feature of this partnership should be the full 
acknowledgment that the woman who keeps the 
home has exactly the same right to a say in the 
disposal of the money as the man who earns 
the money. Earning the money is not one whit 
more indispensable than keeping the home. In- 
deed, I am inclined to put it in the second place. 
The husband who does not give his wife, as a 
matter of right, her share in the disposal of the 
common funds is false to his duty. It is not 
a question of favor at all. Aside from the 
money to be spent on common account, for the 
household and the children, the wife has just 
the same right as the husband to her pin money, 
her spending money. It is not his money that 
he gives to her as a gift. It is hers as a matter 
of right. He may earn it; but he earns it be- 
cause she keeps the house; and she has just 
as much right to it as he has. This is not a 
hostile right; it is a right which it is every 
woman's duty to ask and which it should be 

238 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

every man's pride and pleasure to give without 
asking. He is a poor creature if he grudges 
it; and she in her turn is a poor creature if she 
does not insist upon her rights, just exactly as 
she is worse than a poor creature if she does 
not do her duty. 

It is the men who insist upon women doing 
their full duty, who insist that the primary duty 
of the woman is in the home, who also have a 
right to insist that she is just as much entitled 
to the suffrage as is the man. We believe in 
equality of right, not in identity of functions. 
The woman must bear and rear the children, as 
her first duty to the state; and the man's first 
duty is to take care of her and the children. 
In neither case is it the exclusive duty. In 
neither case does it exclude the performance of 
other duties. The right to vote no more implies 
that a woman will neglect her home than that 
a man will neglect his business. Indeed, as re- 
gards one of the greatest and most useful of 
all professions, that of surgery and medicine, it 
is probably true that the average doctor's wife 
has more time for the performance of political 
duties than the average doctor himself. 

There was a capital article recently in The 
Britannia, the official organ of the Women's 
Social and Political Union in England, by Mrs. 
Emmeline Pankhurst. She was urging the full 

239 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

performance of duty in the war both by men 
and by women. In it she denounced the labor- 
ing men who did not whole-heartedly do every- 
thing in their power to aid the cause of Eng- 
land in the war. She spoke of the fact that 
workingmen and women in France could not un- 
derstand how there could be strikes among 
workers in England during the war. She in- 
sisted that the prime duty during the war was 
for the men and women alike to put aside all 
other grievances and make common cause on 
behalf of the nation, and then to try to make 
the country a better one for their children to 
live in. It was a capital article, and it should 
be read by men and women here just as much 
as by men and women in England. It is be- 
cause I believe that the American woman will in 
time of need and when the facts are brought 
home to her take such a position as Mrs. Pank- 
hurst has thus taken, that I emphatically believe 
that she should have the right just as much as 
the man to vote, and, what is even more im- 
portant, that she shall be given her full rights 
in connection with the performance by her as 
wife and mother of those indispensable duties 
which make her the one absolutely indispensable 
citizen of this Republic. 

I end as I began by speaking of the good 
woman who is the best of all good citizens. I 

240 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

speak of goodness in the largest sense, as im- 
plying also wisdom and courage — for the woman 
who is either a fool or a coward is not a really 
useful member of the commonwealth. I ask 
that we search our hearts, that we cast aside 
selfish sloth and craven love of ease, and dare 
to live nobly and bravely. I make my appeal 
to all the good and wise and brave men and 
women of our Republic. I make it in the name 
of the larger Americanism, which means fealty 
to the highest national ideal. I speak for those 
who greatly prize peace, but who prize duty 
and justice and honor even more than peace. 
I believe in that ardent patriotism which will 
make a nation true to itself by making it secure 
justice for all within its own borders, and then 
so far as may be, aid in every way in securing 
just and fair treatment for all the nations of 
mankind. I believe that the people of the 
United States have in them the power to rise to 
the level of their needs, their opportunities and 
their obligations. But they can only do so if 
they face the facts, however unpleasant. For 
some years we have as a people shown an ap- 
palling unfitness for world leadership on behalf 
of the democratic ideal; for, especially during 
the last three years, we have played a mean and 
sordid part among the nations, and have been 
faithless to our obligations and to all the old- 

241 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

time ideals of American patriotism. Women, as 
much as men, must put righteousness and justice 
before peace. We must prepare at once in amplest 
fashion to defend ourselves against outside ag- 
gression from any source, and the women must 
do their part just as much as the men. Then, in 
addition to striving for material well-being and 
reasonable equality of opportunity for our own 
people, in addition to making ready to defend 
our own rights with our own strength, surely 
the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, the women 
just as much as the men, must, as regards the 
rest of the world, stand at any cost for justice 
and righteousness for and among the peoples 
and the nations of mankind. 

Concrete examples usually teach more than 
abstract statements. The principles laid down 
in this chapter are illustrated in the following 
correspondence between a woman in a small 
town in Michigan and myself. Her letter to me 
ran: 

"February 3, 19 16, , Michigan. 

"Dear Sir: When you were talking of 'race 
suicide' I was rearing a large family on almost 
no income. I often thought of writing to you 
of some of my hardships and now when *pre- 
paredness' may take some of my boys I feel I 
must. I have eleven of my own and brought 

242 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

up three step-children, and yet in the thirty 
years of my married Hf e I have never had a 
new cloak or winter hat. I have sent seven 
children to school at one time. I had a family 
of ten for eighteen years with no money to hire 
a washerwoman though bearing a child every 
two years. Nine — several through or nearly — 
of my children have got into high school and 
two into State Normal School and one into the 
University of Michigan. I haven't eaten a paid- 
for meal in twenty years or paid for a night's 
lodging in thirty. Not one of the five boys — 
the youngest is fifteen — use tobacco or liquor. 
I have worn men's discarded shoes much of the 
time. I have had little time for reading. 

"I think I have served my country, my hus- 
band has been an invalid for six years — leaving 
me the care and much work on our little sandy 
farm. I have bothered you enough. To me 
race suicide has perhaps a different meaning 
when I think my boys may have to face the 
cannon. 

"Respectfully, 

"Mrs. r 

I answered as follows: 

"February 9, 1916. 

"My dear Mrs. : Your letter interests 

me very much. It interests me both because of 
what you tell me about yourself, and because of 

243 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

what may be the attitude of mind of other 
women and men, whom I heartily respect and 
admire, and who do not understand quite what 
it is that I am trying to say to our people. 

"You say that when I was talking of race 
suicide you were rearing a large family on almost 
no income; that you often thought of writing to 
me of some of your hardships ; and that now, in- 
asmuch as my ^preparedness' policy may take 
some of your boys, you feel you must write to me. 
You state you have eleven children of your own 
and have brought up three step-children, and 
that yet, in the thirty years of your married 
life, you have 'never had a new cloak or winter 
hat' ; and that you had sent seven of the children 
to school at one time and had a family of ten for 
eighteen years, with no money to hire a washer- 
woman, although you were bearing a child every 
two years; and you say that, of your children, 
nine have gotten into high school and two into 
the State Normal School and one into the Uni- 
versity of Michigan; that you 'haven't eaten a 
paid-for meal in twenty years or paid for a 
night's lodging in thirty,' and that you have 
had most of the time to wear ^len's discarded 
shoes and have had little time for reading; and 
you say that you feel that you have served your 
country. (And so you have.) You add that 
your husband has been an invalid for six years, 

244 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

so that you have had to do most of the work 
on your little sandy farm. You end by saying 
that race suicide has perhaps a different mean- 
ing to you now, when you think your boys 'may 
have to face the cannon/ 

''Now, my dear Mrs. , you have de- 
scribed a career of service which makes me feel 
more like taking off my hat to you and saluting 
you as a citizen deserving of the highest honor, 
than I would feel as regards any colonel of a 
crack regiment. But you seem to think, if I un- 
derstand your letter aright, that 'preparedness' 
is in some way designed to make your boys food 
for cannon. Now, as a matter of fact, the 
surest way to prevent your boys from being 
food for cannon is to have them, and all the 
other young men of the country — my boys, for 
instance, and the boys of all other fathers and 
mothers throughout the country — so trained, so 
prepared, that it will not be safe for any for- 
eign foe to attack us. Preparedness no more 
invites war than fire insurance invites a fire. I 
shall come back to this matter again in a mo- 
ment. But I will speak to you first a word as 
to what you say about race suicide. I have 
never preached the imposition of an excessive 
maternity on any woman. I have always said 
that every man worth calling such will feel a 
peculiar sense of chivalric tenderness toward his 

245 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

wife, the mother of his children. He must be 
unselfish and considerate with her. But, ex- 
actly as he must do his duty, so she must do 
her duty. I have said that it is self-evident that 
unless the average woman, capable of having 
children, has four, the race will not go forward; 
for this is necessary in order to offset the 
women who for proper reasons do not marry, or 
who, from no fault of their own, have no chil- 
dren, or only one or two, or whose children die 
before they grow up. I do not want to see us 
Americans forced to import our babies from 
abroad. I do not want to see the stock of people 
like yourself and like my family die out — and 
you do not either; and it will inevitably die out 
if the average man and the average woman are 
so selfish and so cold that they wish either no 
children, or just one or two children. We have 
had six children in this family. We wish we 
had more. Now the grandchildren are coming 
along; and I am sure you agree with me that no 
other success in life, not being President, or 
being wealthy, or going to college, or anything 
else, comes up to the success of the man and 
woman who can feel that they have done their 
duty and that their children and grandchildren 
rise up to call them blessed. 

"You have had to work very hard, but, Mrs. 

, I am sure you are the type of woman 

246 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

who takes pride in what you have accompHshed. 
Surely, you feel you are entitled to respect, not 
sympathy or pity. Certainly this is the way / 
feel about you. I feel that you are the kind of 
American of whom all good Americans should 
be proud. I think that what you have done puts 
you in the first rank of those men and women 
of this generation who have served their 
country. 

"Now, for what you say about preparedness. 
I am enclosing you a slip of paper containing 
an account of the destruction that has been 
wrought in Belgium by the German Army. 
Over 18,000 houses have been destroyed. You 
will see that in one town 127 out of 130 houses 
were burned to the ground, and in another 1,263 
out of 1,375. A population twice the size of 
that of Michigan is now living under conditions 
where, if the women of a family are maltreated, 
the father and sons dare not stand up for them 
against any soldier of the invading army, be- 
cause they would be shot if they did so. In 
some towns, the officers treat the women and 
children well. In other towns they permit 
frightful misconduct toward them. Would you 
wish your sons to see you and their sisters 
frightfully maltreated and be afraid in any way 
even to show resentment against the brutal men 
guilty of the misconduct? This is exactly what 

247 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

has happened to the population of Belgium — 
7,000,000 souls — because they had not prepared 
their strength in advance. Belgium gave no 
cause of offense to any nation. She was much 
freer from giving offense than the United States 
has been. She had not committed a wrong of 
any kind or sort; but she was rich; she was 
badly prepared; only a small proportion of her 
people had been trained to war; and so she was 
invaded. For eighteen months her people have 
been living in misery such as you and I can 
hardly picture to ourselves. The shame, the 
humiliation and suffering have been well-nigh 
intolerable. Many hundreds of Belgian women 
and children, many thousands of men, have been 
killed. Multitudes of innocent non-combatants 
have been killed, or their houses burned, and 
their little all taken from them. Many hun- 
dreds of thousands are in the direst want. All 
are suffering greatly. And this is because her 
allies (and indeed Belgium herself) were not 
prepared, as Germany was, and because a big, 
powerful neutral nation like the United States 
did not dare to stand up for them. 

"Mrs. Roosevelt and I have four sons and 
they are as dear to us as your sons are to you. 
If we now had war, these four boys would all 
go. We think it entirely right that they should 
go if their country needs them. But I do not 

248 



THE PARASITE WOMAN 

think it fair that they should be sent to defend 
the boys who are too soft or too timid 'to face 
the cannon/ or the other boys who wish to stay 
at home to make money while somebody else 
protects them. If throughout this country all 
young men like your sons and like mine are 
trained so that they can defend this country in 
time of trouble, I do not believe that the trouble 
will ever come. Preparedness will probably pre- 
vent these boys from having 'to face the can- 
non' ; but if other nations become convinced that 
the mothers of this country have raised their 
boys to be afraid to face the cannon, then you 
can be absolutely certain that, sooner or later, 
these other nations will come over and treat us 
just as the military powers of the Old World have 
treated the Chinese. The Chinese were 'too 
proud to fight'; and so they have been kicked. 
Those of our people who are 'too proud to fight' 
ought to wear pigtails. 

"You say you have had little time for read- 
ing; but your letter interests me so that I am 
sending you a copy of my autobiography. You 
won't care to read it all; but I wish you would 
read about our family life and about what I say 
of war and of social justice. I think, on the 
whole, you will agree with what is therein said. 
"Sincerely yours, 

"Theodore Roosevelt.'^ 
249 



CHAPTER XII 

BIRTH REFORM, FROM THE POSITIVE, NOT THE 
NEGATIVE, SIDE 

O EFORMS are excellent, but if there is nobody 
to reform their value becomes somewhat 
problematical. In order to make a man into a 
better citizen we must first have the man. In 
order that there shall be a "fuller and better ex- 
pressed life for the average woman," that aver- 
age woman must be in actual existence. And the 
first necessity in ''bringing up the child aright" 
is to produce the child. 

Stated in the abstract, these propositions are 
of bromidic triteness. But an astonishingly large 
number of persons, including a lamentably large 
number who call themselves social reformers, 
either are, or act as if they were, utterly blind to 
them when they try to deal with life in the con- 
crete. This is true of every group of persons 
who treat Bernard Shaw seriously as a social re- 
former. It is true of every group of reformers 
who discuss the home and the school, but regard 
it as indelicate to lay stress on the fact that 

250 



BIRTH REFORM 

neither is worth discussing unless there are chil- 
dren in sufficient numbers to make the home and 
the school worth perpetuating. It is true of all 
blatant sham reformers who, in the name of a 
new morality, preach the old, old vice and self- 
indulgence which rotted out first the moral fiber 
and then even the external greatness of Greece 
and Rome. It is true of the possibly well-mean- 
ing but certainly silly persons who fail to see 
that we merely enunciate a perfectly plain mathe- 
matical truth when we say that the race will die 
out unless the average family contains at least 
three children, and therefore that less than this 
number always means that, whether because of 
their fault or their misfortune, the parents are 
bearing less than their share of the common bur- 
dens, and are rendering less than their due pro- 
portion of patriotic service to the nation. 

There has recently been published a "Study of 
the Birth Rate in Harvard and Yale Graduates/' 
by John C. Phillips, of Boston. It should be cir- 
culated as a tract among all those most foolish of 
all foolish people, the half-baked educated people 
who advocate a profoundly immoral attitude 
toward life in the name of "reform" through 
"birth control." These people see that in the 
"submerged tenth" of society, and even among 
all the very poor, excessive child bearing is a 
grave evil which crushes the woman, turning her 

251 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

into a broken-spirited, overworked, slatternly 
drudge; and which therefore crushes the family 
also, making it difficult for the children, on the 
average, to rise above a very low level. They do 
not see that it is the directly reverse danger 
against which we have to guard as soon as we 
rise above the class of the very poor, of those 
whose livelihood is so precarious that they are 
always on the brink of the gulf of disaster. As 
soon as we get above this lowest class the real 
danger in American families, whether of mechan- 
ics, farmers, railroad workers, railroad presi- 
dents, deep-sea fishermen, bankers, teachers or 
lawyers, is not lest they have too many children, 
but lest they have too few. Yet it is precisely 
these people who are really influenced by the 
"birth control" propaganda. What this nation 
vitally needs is not the negative preaching of 
birth control to the submerged tenth, and the 
tenth immediately adjoining, but the positive 
preaching of birth encouragement to the eight- 
tenths who make up the capable, self-respecting 
American stock which we wish to see perpetuate 
itself. 

Mr. Phillips studies the birth rate for the two 
colleges in question by decades from 1850 to 1890. 
The figures for both colleges are substantially 
similar, Yale making a trifle better showing. 
They prove conclusively that for over fifty years 

252 



BIRTH REFORM 

the men who have been graduated from Harvard 
and Yale have left behind them a number of sons 
inferior to their own number — that is, to the num- 
ber of fathers — and that, therefore, this college 
stock, which in point of worthy achievement is 
certainly among the thoroughly good stocks of 
the country, is tending to die out ; and they show 
that this tendency has hitherto been slightly ac- 
centuated with each decade. 

For the decade ending in 1870, for example, 
the showing was a trifle better than in 1880; and 
in 1890 there was a further, although a slighter, 
drop. 1890 was taken as the last year, because 
the number of children born to graduates after 
they have been graduated f^r a quarter of a cen- 
tury is too few materially to affect the averages. 

On the average, during the thirty years, the 
graduate who married did so after he had left 
college eight years. About 78 per cent, married, 
roughly four-fifths. But over 20 per cent, of the 
marriages were childless. This leaves only three- 
fifths of the men of the class who contracted fer- 
tile marriages, and who, therefore, if their stock 
were to progress, had to make good the shortcom- 
ings of their fellows. The average number of 
children per capita per married graduate was 
about 2.3, and shrank decade by decade. Taking 
the entire number of graduates the average num- 
ber of children surviving was 1.55 per capita (of 

253 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

whom, of course, on the average half are daugh- 
ters). This means roughly, that in these thirty 
classes of Harvard and Yale graduates, repre- 
senting, of course, a high average of the energy, 
ambition and cultivation, and a reasonably high 
average of the wealth, of the land, every four 
fathers left behind them three sons. If this ratio 
continues it will mean that 140 years hence — a 
period as long as that which divides us from the 
Declaration of Independence — the average col- 
lege graduates of to-day will be represented in 
their descendents by only three-tenths of their 
present number. 

This would be bad enough if the disease were 
confined to college graduates. But, as Mr. Phil- 
lips shows in the brief summaries at the end of 
his article, it is merely representative of what 
is taking place among native-born Americans 
generally. 

The most pitiable showing is made by the grad- 
uates of the women's colleges. So far, among the 
older classes of the older among these colleges, 
the average girl is represented in the next gen- 
eration by only 0.86 of a child. This means, that 
for every five possible mothers there were two 
daughters. Do these colleges teach "domestic 
science," and if so, what is it that they teach? 
There is something radically wrong with the 
home training and the school training that pro- 

254 



BIRTH REFORM 

duce such results. To say this, is not in the 
least to join with the ignorant and foolish man 
who denounces higher education for woman; he 
is usually himself a striking illustration of the 
need of wiser education for men. But it most 
certainly is a recognition of the fact, not that 
there should be any abandonment of, nor indeed 
any failure to enlarge, the scheme of higher edu- 
cation for women, but that for women as for men 
this higher education should keep a firm grip on 
the true perspective of Hfe, and should refuse to 
sacrifice the great essentials of existence to even 
the easiest and pleasantest non-essentials. 

The trouble in our national life, however, is 
far more deep-seated than anything affecting 
only the most highly educated classes. The same 
drift is visible among our people generally; most 
so in the East, and in the cities and big towns of 
the West. In Massachusetts, for the twenty-five 
years ending in 191 1, the deaths among the na- 
tive-born population exceeded the births by 270,- 
000, whereas during the same period the births 
in families with foreign-born parents exceeded 
the deaths by nearly 530,000. If this process con- 
tinues the work of perfecting the boasted com- 
mon school and college system for Massachu- 
setts native Americans will prove about as use- 
ful as the labor of those worthy missionaries who 
on different occasions have translated the Bible 

255 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

into the tongues of savage races who thereupon 
died out. 

In the West the native stock — and I use the 
term with elasticity to include all children of 
mothers and fathers who were born on this side 
of the water — is only just about holding its own. 
It is a little less than holding its own in the cities, 
a little more than doing so in the country dis- 
tricts. In the cities of Minneapolis and Cleve- 
land, for example, such families average less than 
three children. In the country districts of Min- 
nesota and Ohio they average about one child 
more a family, which in this case marks just the 
difference between increase and decrease. In the 
South the native white stock is still increasing, 
although with diminishing rapidity. 

The figures given for the Harvard and Yale 
graduates show that, taking into account the 
number of children that die before growing up, 
the number of adults that do not marry and the 
number of marriages where for physical and 
natural reasons — that is, reasons presumably im- 
plying no moral blame in the parents — there are 
no children or only one or two children, it is nec- 
essary that the family physically able to produce 
children shall average over three or the race will 
slowly decrease in numbers. When the health 
conditions become such that child mortality is re- 
duced still lower than at present, and when mar- 

256 



BIRTH REFORM 

riages become more universal and the having and 
rearing of a sufficient number of children is rec- 
ognized for both man and woman as the highest 
duty and the greatest and most extraordinary- 
pleasure of life, then an average family of three 
children may mean a slow increase. Under any 
circumstances an average of one or two children 
means rapid race suicide, and therefore profound 
moral delinquency in those wilfully responsible 
for it. But this is not all ! At present whoever 
has only three children must be understood to 
represent a slight drag on the forward movement 
of the nation, a slight falling below the average 
necessary standard in the performance of the in- 
dispensable duty without which there will in the 
end be no nation; the duty, failure to perform 
which means that all talk of eugenics and social 
reform and moral uplift and self -development 
represents mere empty threshing of the air, as 
pointless as similar talk by a suicide. 

What I have said does not represent preaching. 
It merely represents the application of certain 
mathematical truths to life. It is no more debat- 
able than the statement that less than two and 
two cannot make four. Apparently some persons 
regard it as a satisfactory answer to point out 
that some worthless or hopelessly poverty- 
stricken family would benefit themselves and the 
country by having fewer children. I heartily 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

agree to this, and will support any measures to 
make this agreement effective by limiting the pro- 
duction of the unfit, after we have first taken ef- 
fective measures to promote the production of the 
fit. Doubtless there are communities which it 
would be to the interest of the world to have die 
out. But these are not the communities reached 
by the "birth-control'' propagandists — even by 
that rather small proportion of these propagan- 
dists who are neither decadent nor immoral. I 
hold that the average American is a decent, self- 
respecting man, with large capacities for good 
service to himself, his country and the world if a 
right appeal can be made to him and the right re- 
sponse evoked. Therefore, I hold that it is not 
best that he and his kind should perish from the 
earth. The great problem of civilization is to se- 
cure a relative increase of the value as compared 
with the less valuable or noxious elements in the 
population. This problem cannot be met unless 
we give full consideration to the immense in- 
fluence of heredity. There is far less danger of 
our forgetting the also very great influence of 
environment, which includes education. Except 
in a small number of cases, the state can exercise 
little active control against the perpetuation of 
the unfit. Therefore, the real and great service 
must be rendered by those who help put an 
aroused and effective public opinion on the side 

258 



BIRTH REFORM 

of the perpetuation of the stocks from which it 
is particularly important that the future citizen- 
ship of the nation should be drawn. 

Really intelligent eugenists understand and in- 
sist on these facts. The Journal of Heredity for 
July, 191 7, contains one article showing the evil 
which has come from permitting the unrestricted 
breeding of a feeble-minded, utterly shiftless and 
worthless family in Ohio ; and another, and even 
more important article showing that the idea that, 
in a normal and healthy community, large fami- 
lies are an evil is false and dangerous in the high- 
est degree. The writer says : ''Large families in 
the slums may be considered undesirable ; unregu- 
lated [excessive] child-bearing for any woman 
may be considered undesirable; but this [is un- 
true as to] large families separated from the in- 
fluence of poverty. It is doubtless true that in 
the Hull House district, where many children 
have feeble and unintelligent parents and lack the 
necessities of life, a large family means weak- 
ness. But the reverse is true in normally sound 
stocks, in sections of population which have aver- 
age intelligence, physique and prosperity." The 
writer shows that in such normal stocks the 
health of the mother is best, and the infant mor- 
tality lowest, in families with at least six chil- 
dren. The writer shows that in superior parts of 
the population large families are desirable from 

259 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

the point of view of the parents, the children and 
the world, alike; but that "in eugenically inferior 
parts of the population the smaller the family the 
better for all concerned." He shows that the 
birth-control extremists are dealing with patho- 
logical conditions — and indeed themselves repre- 
sent a pathological condition. 

At different times in different nations the needs 
and the duties differ widely. Professor Ross has 
shown that China has suffered immeasurably be- 
cause of the reckless overbreeding of its people. 
France is now in hazard of her national existence 
because of exactly the opposite cause. A century 
ago France was as populous as Germany. Her 
soil is fertile, her natural advantages great. But 
France's population remained nearly stationary 
while Germany's population increased, until the 
two countries stand nearly as five to three. The 
increase in Germany's population was accom- 
panied by such industrial and social development 
(having no relation whatever to such mere 
swarming of poverty-stricken incompetents as 
China and, formerly, Southern Italy have seen) 
as also to mean a marked increase in social and 
national efficiency. In consequence, all of 
France's heroic gallantry and self-devotion and 
her utmost self-sacrifice have been needed in 
order to enable her, with the help of potent allies, 
even to hold back a foe whom once she was able 

260 



BIRTH REFORM 

to meet single-handed. The United States need 
not follow the example of China in order to avoid 
the French shortcomings, and it can still avoid 
these shortcomings while profiting by the mag- 
nificent French example in other ways. 

In instancing France I merely take what the 
best and most patriotic Frenchmen say. The 
French Academy in its Proceedings has through- 
out this war been carrying a series of studies 
on the dwindling birth-rate in France, and has 
shown that on the average the mother capable of 
having children must have over three or the race 
will slowly diminish; of course only one or two 
children means closely impending race suicide. 
As M. Herve has recently said, the man who 
leaves behind him no children, or the father of 
only one son, must hereafter realize that he is 
not a patriot; that he is not doing his duty by his 
country. (I speak, of course, of the average, not 
the exception.) A French newspaper before me 
says: 'Tn 1850 the population of France sur- 
passed that of Germany. When this war broke 
out it had become inferior by 2.y millions. It was 
this fact to which the war was really due. If the 
Germans had had before them 60 millions of 
French instead of 39 they would have hesitated 
long. The cause of the war was that we had not 
furnished to France enough children. ... If 
the French birth-rate continues to diminish we 

261 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

shall some day face a new war of conquest waged 
against us. It is a question of life or death which 
confronts France. She must live ! But in order 
to live she must face the implacable realities of 
existence. The national conscience should insist 
that our legislators put the matter of the repopu- 
lation of France in the first place.'' The lesson 
applies as much to the United States. If our 
birth-rate continues to diminish we shall by the 
end of this century be impotent in the face of 
powers like Germany, Russia or Japan; we shall 
have been passed by the great states of South 
America. 

We are dealing with rules, not with exceptions. 
We are discussing the birth-rate in any given 
community, just as we discuss the ability of a 
community in time of war to provide soldiers for 
the nation's safety. In any small group of men 
it may happen that, for good and sufficient rea- 
sons, it is impossible for any of the members to 
go to war : two or three may be physically unfit, 
two or three may be too old or too young, and 
the remaining two or three may be performing 
civil duties of such vital consequence to the com- 
monwealth that it would be wrong to send them 
to the Front. In such case no blame attaches to 
any individual, and high praise may attach to 
all. But if in a group of a thousand men more 
than a small minority are unwilling and unfit to 

262 



BIRTH REFORM 

go to war in the hour of the nation's need, then 
there is something radically wrong with them, 
spiritually or physically, and they stand in need 
of drastic treatment. So it is as regards mar- 
riage and children. In a small group there may 
be good and sufficient explanations why the indi- 
vidual men and women have remained unmar- 
ried ; and the fact that those that marry have no 
children, or only one or two children, may be 
cause only for sincere and respectful sympathy. 
But if, in a community of a thousand men and a 
thousand women, a large proportion of them, re- 
main unmarried, and if of the marriages so many 
are sterile, or with only one or two children, that 
the population is decreasing, then there is some- 
thing radically wrong with the people of that 
community as a whole. The trouble may be 
partly physical, partly due to the strange troubles 
which accompany an over-strained intensity of 
life. But even in this case the root trouble is 
probably moral; and in all probability the whole 
trouble is moral, and is due to a complex tissue 
of causation in which coldness, love of ease, striv- 
ing after social position, fear of pain, dislike of 
hard work and sheer inability to get life values in 
their proper perspective all play a part. 

The fundamental instincts are not only the 
basic but also the loftiest instincts in human na- 

263 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ture. The qualities that make men and women 
eager lovers, faithful, duty-performing, hard- 
working husbands and wives, and wise and de- 
voted fathers and mothers stand at the founda- 
tions of all possible social welfare, and also rep- 
resent the loftiest heights of human happiness 
and usefulness. No other form of personal suc- 
cess and happiness or of individual service to the 
state compares with that which is represented by 
the love of the one man for the one woman, of 
their joint work as home-maker and home-keeper, 
and of their ability to bring up the children that 
are theirs. 

Among human beings, as among all other liv- 
ing creatures, if the best specimens do not, and 
the poorer specimens do, propagate, the type will 
go down. If Americans of the old stock lead 
lives of celibate selfishness (whether profligate or 
merely frivolous or objectless, matters little), or 
if the married are afllicted by that base fear of 
living which, whether for the sake of themselves 
or of their children^ forbids them to have more 
than one or two children, disaster awaits the na- 
tion. It is not well for a nation to import its art 
and its literature; but it is fatal for a nation to 
import its babies. And it is utterly futile to 
make believe that fussy activity for somebody 
else's babies atones for failure of personal parent- 
hood. I shall never forget witnessing a reception 

264 



BIRTH REFORM 

given by the governor of a big state to a 
"Mothers' Meeting." The governor enthusiastic- 
ally advised his audience to remember that it was 
their duty to have a sufficient number of healthy 
children so that the race should go forward and 
not backward; and then discovered that the 
"mothers" were such only in a highly figurative 
sense, the large majority being spinster school- 
teachers and many of the remainder zealous 
maiden ladies at the head of philanthropic asso- 
ciations. They were there to tell some one else 
how to do the vital work! Now, it was quite 
proper for them to be there, but they should have 
been there as distinctly subordinate to the 
mothers themselves. 

The remedy? There are many remedies, all of 
them partial. The state can do something, as the 
state is now doing in France. Legislation must 
be for the average, for the common good. There- 
fore legislation should at once abandon the 
noxious sentimentality of thinking that in Amer- 
ica at this time the "only son" is entitled to pref- 
erential consideration, either for the sake of him- 
self or of his mother. The preference, as regards 
all obligations to the state, should be given to the 
family having the third and fourth children. In 
all public offices in every grade the lowest salaries 
should be paid the man or woman with no chil- 
dren, or only one or two children, and a marked 

265 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

discrimination made in favor of the man or 
woman with a family of over three children. In 
taxation, the rate should be immensely heavier 
on the childless and on the families with one or 
two children, while an equally heavy discrimina- 
tion should lie in favor of the family with over 
three children. This should apply to the income 
tax and inheritance tax, and as far as possible to 
other taxes. I speak, as usual, of the average, 
not the exception. Only the father and mother 
of over three children have done their full duty 
by the state ; and the state should emphasize this 
fact. No reduction should be made in a man's 
taxes merely because he is married. But he 
should be exempted on an additional $500 of in- 
come for each of his first two children, and on J 
an additional $1,000 of income for every subse- 
quent child — for we wish to put especial empha- j 
sis on the vital need of having the third, and the I 
fourth and the fifth children. The men and 
women with small or reasonable incomes are the 
ones who should be encouraged to have children ; 
they do not represent a class which will be 
tempted by such exemption to thriftlessness or 
extravagances. I do not believe that there should 
be any income exemption whatever for the un- 
married man or the childless married couple; let 
all the exemptions be for the married couples of 
moderate means who have children. 

266 



BIRTH REFORM ^ 

An aroused and enlightened public opinion can 
do infinitely more. There must be a sterner sense 
of duty and a clearer vision of the perspectives 
among which duty must work. That standard of 
living is poor, whether for mechanic or bank 
president, which is based on ease, comfort, lux- 
ury and social ambition rather than on education, 
culture and wide ability to shift for oneself. The 
oldest duty of all is that owed by the fathers and 
mothers of Americans to care for the future of 
their country and the ideals of their race. The 
man and the woman must be partners in love, in 
mutual forbearance, in gallant facing of the 
future, in wise choice of duty among conflicting 
considerations. I would be the first to admit that 
no universal rule can be laid down, applicable to 
all people under all conditions. But let our peo- 
ple study, not only books on sociology, but also 
stories like Kathleen Norris's "Mother," Cor- 
nelia Comer's 'Treliminaries," and Dorothy Can- 
field's "Hillsboro People." These books are 
wholesome reading for man and for woman — and 
they have the additional merit of being in- 
teresting. 

The serious student can turn to one of the 
best books recently written by an American 
scientific man: "Heredity and Environment," 
by Prof. Edwin C. Conklin, of Princeton. 
Let him look at pages 434-5, 450-455, and 498- 

26y 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

507. I wish these pages could be circulated as a 
teacher's leaflet in all our schools and universities, 
in all the editorial rooms of our magazines and 
newspapers — especially in those whose editors 
pose as reformers and advocate every form of 
quack remedy from pacifism to birth-control. 
Says Mr. Conklin (I condense) : "The cause for 
alarm is the declining birth-rate in the best ele- 
ments of a population, while it continues to in- 
crease among the poorer elements. The descend- 
ants of the Puritans and the Cavaliers, who have 
raised the cry for 'fewer and better children,' are 
already disappearing, and in a few centuries, at 
most, will have given place to more fertile races 
of mankind . . . if we had fewer luxuries we 
could have, and could afford to have, more chil- 
dren. . . . No eugenical reform can fail to 
take account of the fact that the decreasing birth- 
rate among intelligent people is a constant menace 
to the race. We need not 'fewer and better chil- 
dren,' but more children of the better sort and 
fewer of the worse variety. There is great enthu- 
siasm to-day on the part of many childless re- 
formers for negative eugenical measures. [They 
forget that] sterility is too easily acquired ; what 
is not so easily brought about is the fertility of 
the better lines. . . . What Bernard Shaw 
regards as the greatest discovery of the nine- 
teenth century, vi^., artificially limiting the size 

268 



BIRTH REFORM 

of families, may prove to be the greatest menace 
to the human race. . . . The chief motive for 
limiting the size of families is personal comfort 
and pleasure rather than the welfare of the race. 
It is more important for the welfare of the race 
that children with good inheritance [in mind, 
body and will] should be brought into the world 
than that parents should live easy lives and have 
no more children than they can conveniently rear 
amid all the comforts of a luxury-loving age. 
. . . Race preservation, not self-preservation, 
is the first law of nature. Among the higher 
organisms, the strongest of all the instincts are 
those connected with reproduction. The struggle 
to be free is part of a great evolutionary move- 
ment, but the freedom must be a sane one, which 
neither injures others nor eliminates posterity. 
[Any movement which] demands freedom from 
marriage and reproduction is suicidal. In every 
age and country where men, and especially 
women, have demanded freedom from the bur- 
dens of bearing and rearing children, as well as 
from other natural social obligations, the end has 
been degeneration and extinction . . . if we 
continue to put individual freedom and luxury 
and selfishness above social obligations, our race 
and civilization will also see the writing on the 
wall: Thou art weighed in the balance and art 
found wanting.'' 

269 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

In any discussion such as this, where it is 
necessary to deal in sweeping manner with great 
truths, the statements made must be accepted as 
referring to the general and the average con- 
ditions. It is not possible at every point to 
qualify them so as to allow for exceptions. In 
this case it is, in my judgment, vital to establish 
the principles above laid down as generally ap- 
plicable, and to insist that no country is healthy, 
indeed that any country is sick nigh to death, 
where these principles are not in general lived 
up to. But, of course, there are exceptions. 
There are a few — a very few — good men and 
women who, when unmarried, can do such ad- 
mirable work that the question of marriage is 
negligible so far as they are concerned. There 
are men and women who remain unmarried for 
good and sufficient reasons, even although they 
never do great work in the outside world. The 
imposition on any woman of excessive child- 
bearing is a brutal wrong; and of all human 
beings a husband should be most considerate 
of his wife. Then, among married couples 
who are childless or have only one or two 
children, there are plenty to whom this is a 
dreadful grief and who are morally in no 
way to blame. For these men and women 
I have the same respectful sympathy that I 
have for a gallant man, of soldier stock, who, 

270 



BIRTH REFORM 

because of physical trouble for which he is 
in no way responsible, is denied the chance to 
serve his country under arms when that coun- 
try's need is sore. There is no more fearless 
and danger-defying heroism than that shown 
by some women of the true heroic type, in walk- 
ing through the valley of the shadow to bring 
into life the babies they love; and there is no 
punishment too heavy for the man who does not 
revere and serve such a woman as he reveres 
and serves nothing else that is human. And it 
may be his highest duty if the danger is too 
great to see that she does not face it. I know 
one girl who has just for the second time 
eagerly faced motherhood; and to bring the 
second baby to join her first she had to show a 
splendid courage which (and I speak accurately) 
ranges her beside any of the men who in their 
ragged blue and buff and their gaping shoes 
followed Washington, or any gaunt Confederate 
who charged with Pickett, or any of the sailor- 
men who held the sinking launch steady while 
Gushing torpedoed the Albemarle; which ranges 
her beside her husband and brothers who have 
crossed the sea to face the German and Turkish 
armies. 

It would be wicked, without due thought, to 
expose woman or man, girl or young man, to 

271 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

the possible stroke of fate; but we revere them 
all alike, precisely because they face the stroke 
of fate, high-hearted, if the need warrants it. 
They only who are not afraid to die are fit to 
live! 



272 



i 



APPENDIX A 
Why We are at War; the German Horror 

Chapters II, VII, X, and XI are based on articles that 
have appeared in The Metropolitan ; chapter VIII on 
an article that has appeared in The Outlook; chapter 
III on a speech delivered on the Fourth of July last. 

Let those who wish to understand the hideous evil 
wrought by the foes who at the moment are the most dan- 
gerous of those outside our own household, and the even 
greater menace to our future well-being presented by 
those who at the moment are the most dangerous of the 
foes within our own household, read such books as Owen 
Wister's "Pentecost of Calamity," Gustavus Ohlinger's 
"Their True Faith and Allegiance," James Beck's "Evi- 
dence in the Case," and "The War and Humanity," 
Arthur Gleason's "Golden Lads," and "Our Part in the 
Great War," Frederick Palmer's "With Our Faces To- 
wards the Light," Vernon Kellogg's "Headquarters' 
Nights," and the various documents, including poems, 
sketches, brief essays issued by that capital organization 
the Vigilantes — among the writers being Hermann Hage- 
dorn. Porter Emerson Browne, Julian Street, Edwin 
Carty Ranck, and Wm. H. Fischer. If any man still 
honestly wishes to know "why we are at war," these 
writings will enlighten him. He can well ask why we 
did not go to war immediately after the Lusitania horror 
— and to this there never can be any satisfactory answer; 
but no brave and patriotic man or woman has the right 
to ask why we are at war now. 

Germany and her subject-allies are now our foes from 

273 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

without. We must oppose her imperious will and high 
efficiency by developing as rapidly as possible an equal 
efficiency and by using it with an even firmer will until we 
have brought down her whole fabric of Prussianized mili- 
tarism. But she does not rely merely on military efficiency.^. 
She relies just as much on a policy of organized terrorism 
and brutality, firmly trusting thereby to daunt and cow all 
men with a streak of cowardice in their make-up, and 
trusting no less to the assistance she always receives in 
her brutality from the base folly of the pacifists in our 
land, and from the intrigues of the paid and unpaid Ger- 
man tools and sympathizers. We should meet her terror- 
ism and brutality by a stern and relentless retaliation; 
and this would mean not brutality, but the putting a stop 
to brutality. Until the German people separate them- 
selves from the German Government we are against the 
German people ; and Germany has shown that she re- 
spects nothing whatever but force; that she treats good 
conduct as weakness, and that she can be withheld from 
the foulest cruelty only by punishment and by fear. 

We are fighting this war for humanity. But primarily 
we are fighting it for America. Germany has murdered 
our innocent men, women and children wholesale. She 
has plotted to dismember us. She has brutally wronged 
us. We fight her armies abroad in order that we our- 
selves or our children may not have to fight them here, 
on this continent, beside our own ruined homes. 

During the last few months, since we have been at war 
with Germany, the Germans have added to the list of in- 
.^JEamies they have committed in Belgium, Servia and Rou- 
mania, and to those which their tools and allies the Turks 
have committed in Armenia and Syria, the fresh infamy 
of the devastation of the parts of France from which 
they have retreated. 

274 



WHY WE ARE AT WAR 

This devastation, now being perpetrated, is in accord- 
ance with the fixed military policy of Germany. It is 
done merely with malignant purpose and without hope of 
military advantage. In March, 191 7, the military corre- 
spondent of the Berlin Lokalanzeiger gleefully described 
the process : 

"In the course of these last months great stretches of 
French territory have been turned by us into a dead coun- 
try. It varies in width from six and a quarter to seven 
and a half or eight miles, and extends along the whole of 
our new position, presenting a terrible barrier of desola- 
tion to any enemy hardy enough to advance against our 
new lines. No village or farm was left standing on this 
glacis, no road was left passable, no railway track or em- 
bankment was left in being. Where once were woods 
there are gaunt rows of stumps; the wells have been 
blown up, wires, cables and pipe lines destroyed. In front 
of our new position runs, like a gigantic ribbon, an em- 
pire of death." 

The Berlin Tageblatt gloats over this destruction of 
the dwellings and property of helpless peasants as fol- 
lows: 

"And the desert, a pitiful desert leagues wide, bare of 
trees and undergrowth and houses ! They sawed and 
hacked ; trees fell and bushes sank ; it was days and days 
before they had cleared the ground. In this war zone 
there was to be no shelter, no cover. The enemy's mouth 
must stay dry, his eyes turn in vain to the wells — they 
are buried in rubble. No four walls for him to settle 
down into ; all levelled and burnt out, the villages turned 
into dumps of rubbish, churches and church towers laid 
out in ruins athwart the roads." 

This brutal devastation did not in the slightest degree 
check the advance of the French armies. Across the 

275 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

waste they built highways and rebuilt roads. The wells 
were poisoned; but the armies laid water pipes for their 
supply. Every farmhouse and peasant's cot was reduced 
to dust, but the armies carried their own shelter. 

The "frightfulness" had no more military purpose or 
effect than the "f rightfulness" which expressed itself in 
the baby-killing and woman-killing air-raids on England ; 
and it was no more excusable than the butcheries and 
slave-drives in Belgium and Poland. 

Germany has re-introduced from the dark ages poison 
gas and liquid fire, so as to kill her enemies with torture. 
With cynical cruelty she has attacked hospitals and hos- 
pital ships, nurses, doctors, surgeons and wounded 
patients alike. She has deliberately destroyed undefended 
villages, and churches and schools. She has murdered in 
cold blood, in broad day and in the darkness of night, on 
cold and stormy seas, the non-combatant officers and 
crews, and the passengers, including women and children, 
on merchantmen of all flags, repeatedly including our 
own. She has persecuted, tortured, raped and abused 
her victims, and has loaded the wretched survivors with 
crushing monetary fines. 

The nation responsible for such horrors is the foe of 
humanity. Whoever in the peace discussions proposes to 
treat that nation as on an equal footing of right with its 
antagonists is serving the powers of the pit. Peace with- 
out victory over such a nation would be a far-reaching 
wrong to mankind. We should fight this foe to a com- 
plete victory, if it takes five years, and ten million men, 
and even if all our allies made peace. 



276 



APPENDIX B 

Fair Play for All Americans 

June 26, 191 7. 

My dear Sir: 

In the New York Times of the 22nd and 23rd 
instant it is stated that the United States Government 
has announced that in Red Cross units sent to the 
base hospitals of the alHes abroad, American citizens 
born in Germany or in Austro-Hungary, or whose 
parents were born in Germany or Austro-Hungary will 
not be allowed to serve. 

I very earnestly hope that the Government will at 
once recede from this position. If our Red Cross units 
are not desired abroad, whether with the base hospitals 
of the allies, or anywhere else, then we can use them 
purely for our people or with our own armies; but 
wherever we do send them it should be on the assump- 
tion that we no more permit distinction to be made 
among the American personnel on the ground of birth- 
place or parentage than on the ground of creed. Service 
in the Red Cross should be like service in the ranks of 
the army; no man worthy to serve in one should be 
barred from service in the other. If any spy or dis- 
loyal person is found in either, in the theater of war, 
he should be hung out of hand or shot by drumhead 
court-martial, without mercy, whether he is of native or 
foreign parentage. But it is an intolerable wrong and 
insult to discriminate, or permit discrimination, between 
loyal and devoted Americans because of their parentage 
or birthplace. 

277 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

I have the right to speak in this matter because I 
have insisted that we should take the most drastic 
measures against any man who acts disloyally; and I 
hold that all men who attack our allies or uphold our 
enemies while we are in this war are disloyal to Amer- 
ica. No man can now be loyal both to this country and 
to Germany; no man can be both a German and an 
American; he must be either all German or all Ameri- 
can. If he is the former, he should be turned out of 
the country or put in a detention camp. If he is the 
latter, it is an intolerable outrage not to treat him as 
on an exact equality with all other good Americans. 

When I was President, one of the men who sat in 
my cabinet was born in Germany; another was a de- 
scendant of one of Blucher's colonels. The man who 
has been closest to me politically for the last fifteen 
years is of German parentage. In this great crisis no 
organization has done better work in rousing the slum- 
bering patriotism of the nation than the Vigilantes ; and 
no one of the Vigilantes has done better work than 
Hermann Hagedorn, of German parentage. If I had 
been allowed to raise the four divisions of volunteer 
troops which Congress authorized me to raise, I would 
have asked that one of the divisions should be com- 
manded by General Kuhn, the head of the War Col- 
lege, and another division, or else a brigade, by my old 
head of the Philippine Constabulary, Colonel Band- 
holtz. Both are of German parentage; both are Ameri- 
cans and nothing else ; and I would eagerly and proudly 
have served under either. Four of the regular officers 
whom I would have recommended for Colonels are of 
German parentage or descent. 0,ne of the few non- 
regulars whom I would have recommended for a 
Colonelcy, at present the Colonel of a National Guard 

278 



FAIR PLAY FOR ALL 

regiment in Illinois, is of German parentage; and he 
told me that 85% of the men who would have come 
in with him were of foreign parentage. My head- 
quarters chaplain (not of my religious creed) would 
have been a retired regular army officer, born in Ger- 
many; my brigade quartermaster, a man of German 
parentage. 

These men, and many, many others like them, are 
fit to lead our armies in war, and to hold our highest 
civil offices ; and they stand in the forefront of our citi- 
zenship in time of peace. They are Americans in every 
fiber of soul and body. I would gladly confide the 
honor of the flag to their keeping, exactly as I would 
gladly confide my own honor and good name to their 
keeping. I resent any slur on their loyal Americanism 
as keenly as I would resent any slur on my own ; and 
if they, and those in heart like them, from the highest 
to the lowest, are not fit to represent this country — in 
the army, in the Red Cross, in any and every capacity — 
at home or abroad, then no Americans are fit to repre- 
sent us. 

I earnestly hope that the Government will punish 
with alert, instant and unsparing severity any man of 
whatever origin who is disloyal to us or false to our 
allies, in any position, during this war; but I no less 
earnestly hope that the Government will refuse to per- 
mit any discrimination among true and loyal Americans 
because of their parentage, birthplace or creed. 

Yours truly, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Mr. C. a. a. McGee, 

San Diego, Gal. 



279 



APPENDIX C 
Murder Is Not Debatable 

On July sixth, at the reception in New York to the 
envoys of the Russian Republic, I made a speech of 
welcome. In the course of it I spoke in severe con- 
demnation of the recent riots in East St. Louis, where 
a white mob had murdered and maimed, or otherwise 
maltreated, hundreds of negroes and had burned or 
otherwise destroyed their property. Mr. Gompers, the 
head of the Federation of Labor, in his following 
speech, spoke in extenuation of what had been done, 
so far as the white workingmen were concerned. As 
soon as he was through I spoke briefly again, my re- 
marks being in part as follows : 

"I demand that the Government representatives put 
down violence with ruthless resolution, whether it be of 
white against black or black against white. Before we 
can help others in drawing the beam from their eyes 
let us draw out the beam that is in our own eyes. The 
most dangerous form of sentimental debauch is to give 
expression to good wishes in behalf of virtue some- 
where else when you do not dare to enforce decency in 
your own province. 

''Justice is not merely words. It is to be translated 
into living acts, and how can we praise the people of 
Russia if we by explanation, silence or evasion apologize 
for murdering the helpless. In the past I have listened 
to the same form of excuse from the Russian autocracy 
for the pograms inflicted on the Jews. Shall we by 

280 



MURDER IS NOT DEBATABLE 

silence acquiesce in this amazing apology for the mur- 
der of men, women and children in our own country? 

"Never will I sit motionless while directly or in- 
directly apology is made for murder of the helpless." 

Mr. Gompers in his speech had alluded to a telegram 
from the Illinois State Federation of Labor. Subse- 
quently, the secretary of this body sent me a letter 
which I answered, as follows: 

July 17, 1917. 
My dear Sir: 

I thank you for your courteous letter enclosing the 
report of the Committee on Labor of the Illinois State 
Council of Defense, concerning the race riots at East 
St. Louis. They had nothing to do with any commis- 
sion or alleged commission of rape or any other crime. 
Aside from race antipathy, the report seems to show 
that the riots were due to economic conditions, I was 
not informed, in any way, as to these economic condi- 
tions which it is alleged led up to the riot, until after 
Mr. Gompers' speech on July 6th. When on that evening 
I made my first remarks on the riot I supposed the un- 
derlying cause to be racial, and in my remarks I made 
no allusion whatever to organized labor, or indeed to 
labor at all, in connection with the riots. It was Mr. 
Gompers' speech which first gave me clearly to under- 
stand that the fundamental cause was alleged to be 
economic, and that organized labor regarded itself as 
especially concerned witH the riots. Then my attention 
was called to the newspapers of July 4th, which carried 
an alleged statement by Mr. Michael Whalen, President 
of the Central Trades and Labor Councils of East St. 
Louis. If this statement is correctly reported, Mr. 
Whalen said, "The chief objection to the negroes is that 
they would not unionize, and would not strike." I hold 

281 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

with the utmost intensity of conviction, that it is abso- 
lutely impossible for us to succeed along the lines of an 
orderly democracy, a democracy which shall be indus- 
trial as well as political, unless we treat the repression 
of crime, including crimes of violence, and the insistence 
on justice obtained through the enforcement of law, as 
prime necessities. I, of course, refuse, under any con- 
ditions, to accept the fact that certain persons decline 
"to unionize and strike" as warranting their murder, or 
as warranting any kind of violence against them. But 
I go much further than this. I will aid in every way 
in my power to secure by governmental as well as 
private action, the remedying of all the wrongs of labor, 
and in so acting I shall pay no heed to any capitalistic 
opposition. But I refuse to treat any industrial condi- 
tion as warranting riot and murder; and I condemn all 
persons, whether representatives of organized labor or 
not, who attempt to palliate or excuse such crimes, or 
who fail to condemn them in clear-cut and unequivocal 
fashion. I heartily believe in organized labor, just as, 
and even more than, I believe in organized capital; I 
am very proud of being an honorary member of one 
labor organization; but I will no more condone crime or 
violence by a labor organization or by workingmen than 
I will condone crime or wrong-doing by a corporation 
or by capitalists. A square deal for every man ! That 
is the only safe motto for the United States. 

This is a democracy, a government by the people, 
and the people have supreme power if they choose to 
exercise it. The people can get justice peaceably, if 
they really desire it; and if they do not desire it enough 
to show the wisdom, patience and cool-headed deter- 
mination necessary in order to get it peaceably, through 
the orderly process of law, then they haven't the slight- 

282 



MURDER IS NOT DEBATABLE 

est excuse for trying to get it by riot and murder. All 
the governmental authorities concerned in the East St. 
Louis situation should have taken notice of that situa- 
tion in advance, and should take notice of it now. The 
National Government, and all local governmental author- 
ities in places where such a situation is likely to arise, 
should take notice now, and act now. Nine-tenths of 
wisdom is being wise in time. If there has been im- 
proper solicitation of negroes to come to East St. Louis, 
or improper housing and working conditions among 
them after they have come, or an improperly low wage- 
scale, or if anything else improper has been done by 
the capitalists and employers, so that injustice has been 
done the workingmen, then it was the bounden duty, 
and is now the bounden duty, of the Government 
authorities to remedy the wrong and see justice done 
the workingmen. But the first consideration is to stop, 
and to punish, lawless and murderous violence. Lawless 
violence inevitably breeds lawless violence in return, and 
the first duty of the Government is relentlessly to put a 
stop to the violence and then to deal firmly and wisely 
with all the conditions that led up to the violence. If 
black men are lawlessly and brutally murdered, in the 
end the effect is to produce lawlessness among brutal 
blacks. Recently the I. W. W. has been guilty of all 
kinds of misconduct, and has been acting as in effect 
a potent ally of Germany, with whom we are now at 
war; and finally their lawlessness produced an ex- 
plosion of counter-lawlessness. Of course the Govern- 
ment should repress both kinds of lawlessness. It 
should prevent all lawless excesses against the I. W. W. 
and it should also act on the theory that these ex- 
cesses are fundamentally due to the previous failure of 
the Government to deal in drastic fashion and with all 

283 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

necessary severity with the turbulent, lawless, mur- 
derous and treasonable practices which have been so 
common among the I. W. W. and kindred organiza- 
tions. And then it should deal in thoroughgoing fash- 
ion with the social and industrial conditions which have 
produced such results. We Americans must hold the 
scales even. 

A few years ago certain negro troops shot up a 
Texas town, and the other members of their companies 
shielded them from punishment. The Government pro- 
ceeded to the limit of its power against them all, and 
dismissed them from the army; not because they were 
black men who had committed a crime against white 
men, but because they had acted criminally; and justice 
should be invoked against wrong-doers without regard 
to the color of their skins, just as it should be invoked 
against wrong-doers without regard as to whether they 
are rich or poor, whether they are employers or em- 
ployees, whether they are capitalists and heads of cor- 
porations who commit crimes of cunning and arrogance 
and greed, or wage workers and members of labor 
organizations who commit crimes of violence and envy 
and greed. 

I have just received an abusive letter from an organi- 
zation styling itself "The Industrial Council of Kansas 
City," and claiming to be affiliated with the Federation 
of Labor, which states that I accused organized labor of 
being responsible for the outrages at East St, Louis. I 
made no such accusation until the fact that there was 
at least a measure of truth in the accusation had been 
in effect set forth in the speech by the special repre- 
sentative of organized labor at the meeting at which I 
spoke and by the telegram quoted in that speech. When- 
ever I have the power, I will protect the white man 

284 



MURDER IS NOT DEBATABLE 

against the black wrong-doer, and the black man against 
the white wrong-doer; I will as far as I have power 
secure justice for the laboring man who is wronged 
by the man of property, and for every man, whether 
he has property or not, if he is menaced by lawless 
violence; and when I haven't the power, I will at least 
raise my voice in protest, if there is the least chance 
of that protest doing good. 

We are at this moment at war with a most formid- 
able and ruthless enemy. We are fighting for our own 
dearest rights; we are also fighting for tjie rights of 
all self-respecting and civilized nations to liberty and 
self-government. We have demanded that the negro 
submit to the draft and do his share of the fighting 
exactly as the white man does. Surely when such is 
the case we should give him the same protection by the 
law, that we give to the white man. All of us who 
are fit to fight are to serve as soldiers, shoulder to 
shoulder, whether we are farmers or townsfolk, whether 
we are workingmen or professional men, men who em- 
ploy others or men who are employed by others. We 
fight for the same country, we are loyal to the same 
flag, we are all alike eager to pay with our bodies in 
order to serve the high ideals which those who founded 
and preserved this nation believed it our mission to up- 
hold throughout the world. Surely in such case it is 
our duty to treat all our fellow countrymen, rich or 
poor, black or white, with justice and mercy, and, so 
far as may be, in a spirit of brotherly kindness. 

The victims of the mob in East St. Louis were very 
humble people. They were slain, and their little be- 
longings destroyed. In speaking of the draft riots in 
New York during the Civil War, Lincoln, addressing a 
Workingmens' Association, singled out as the saddest 

285 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

feature of the riots the killing "of some working people 
by other working people." We have recently entered 
into a war, primarily it is true to secure our own na- 
tional honor and vital interest, but also with the hope 
of bringing a little nearer to all the world the day when 
everywhere the humble and the mighty shall respect one 
anothers' rights and dwell together in the peace of 
justice. Surely, when we thus go to war against 
tyranny and brutality and oppression, our own hands 
must be clean of innocent blood. We hope to advance 
throughout the world the peace of righteousness and 
brotherhood; surely we can best do so when we insist 
upon this peace of righteousness and brotherhood within 
our own borders. 

In securing such a peace the first essential is to guar- 
antee to every man the most elementary of rights, the 
right to his own life. Murder is not debatable. 

Sincerely yours, 

(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt. 

Mr. Victor A. Olander_, Sec'y-Treas., 
Illinois State Federation of Labor, 
184 W. Washington Street, 
Chicago, 111. 



286 



APPENDIX D 
The "Conscientious Objector'" 

We have heard much of the conscientious objectors to 
military service, the outcry having been loudest among 
those objectors who are not conscientious at all but who 
are the paid or unpaid agents of the German Govern- 
ment. 

It is certain that only a small fraction of the men who 
call themselves conscientious objectors in this matter are 
actuated in any way by conscience. The bulk are slackers, 
pure and simple, or else traitorous pro-Germans. Some 
are actuated by lazy desire to avoid any duty that inter- 
feres with their ease and enjoyment, some by the evil 
desire to damage the United States and help Germany, 
some by sheer, simple, physical timidity. In the aggre- 
gate, the men of this type constitute the great majority of 
the men who claim to be conscientious objectors, and this 
fact must be remembered in endeavoring to deal with the 
class. 

In some of our big cities, since the war began, men have 
formed vegetarian societies, claiming to be exempt from 
service on the ground that they object to killing not 
merely men, but chickens. Others among the leading 
apostles of applied pacificism are not timid men ; on the 
contrary they are brutal, violent men, who are perfectly 
willing to fight, but only for themselves and not for the 
nation. These rough-neck pacifists have always been the 
potent allies of the parlor or milk-and-water pacifists; 
although they stand at the opposite end of the develop- 

287 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

mental scale. The parlor pacifist, the white-handed or 
sissy type of pacifist, represents decadence, represents 
the rotting out of the virile virtues among people 
who typify the unlovely senile side of civilization. 
The rough-neck pacifist, on the contrary, is a mere 
belated savage, who has not been educated to the 
virtues of national patriotism and of willingness to fight 
for the national flag and the national ideal. The savage 
is a turbulent person anxious to brawl and to fight for 
his personal advantage, but too short-sighted and selfish 
to be willing to fight for the common good. So in the 
New York draft riots during the Civil War, the dis- 
turbance was at the outset fostered by the parlor pacifists 
who were shrieking for peace at any price and for the 
immediate stopping of the war; but it speedily passed 
under the management of the rough-neck pacifist mob 
who killed hundreds of innocent people; they were per- 
fectly willing to risk life and to take it to gratify their 
private passions; all that they objected to was risking 
their lives for the well-being and preservation of the 
nation. 

There remains the pacifist, the conscientious objector, 
who really does conscientiously object to war and who 
is sincere about it. As regards these men we must dis- 
criminate sharply between the men deeply opposed to 
war so long as it is possible honorably to avoid it, who 
are ardent lovers of peace, but who put righteousness 
above peace; and the other men who, however sincerely, 
put peace above righteousness, and thereby serve the 
Devil against the Lord. 

The first attitude is that of great numbers of the So- 
ciety of Friends who in this war behave as so very many 
of the Friends did in the Civil War; as that great Eng- 
lish Quaker statesman, John Bright, lover of freedom and 

288 



THE "CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR" 

righteousness, behaved in the Civil War. I w^ish all good 
American peace lovers would read the recent address 
delivered by Professor Albert C. Thatcher of Swarth- 
more, and signed by some scores of the Society of 
Friends. He shows that in the Civil War it is probable 
that their branch of the Society of Friends furnished 
more soldiers in response to Lincoln's call than any other 
denomination. Liberty was part of their religion. They 
not only fought, but they insisted that the war should go 
on, at whatever cost, until it was crowned by complete 
victory. John Bright said, in speaking of the pacifists 
who in the time of the Civil War wanted peace without 
victory : "I want no end of the war, and no compromise, 
and no re-union, 'till the negro is made free beyond all 
chance of failure." He was for peace, but he was not 
for peace at the price of slavery. In the same way now, 
the best and most high-minded Friends, and lovers of 
peace in this country, are for peace, but only as the re- 
sult of the complete overthrow of the barbarous Prussian 
militarism which now is Germany, and the existence of 
which is a perpetual menace to our own country and to 
all mankind. The Friends and peace lovers of this type 
are among the very best citizens of this country. They 
abhor war; but there are things they abhor even more. 
Every good citizen will support them in their opposition 
to wanton or unjust war, to any war entered into save 
from the sternest sense of duty. 

The peace people of the directly opposite type include 
the men who conscientiously object to all participation in 
any war however brutal the opponents, and however vital 
triumph may be to us and to mankind. These persons 
are entitled to precisely the respect we give any other 
persons whose conscience makes them do what is bad. 
We have had in this country some conscientious poly- 

289 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

gamists. We now have some conscientious objectors to 
taking part in this war. Where both are equally con- 
scientious, the former are, on the whole, not as bad 
citizens as the latter. Of course, if these conscientious 
objectors are sincere they decline in private life to op- 
pose violence or brutality or to take advantage of the 
courage and strength of those who do oppose violence 
and brutality. If these men are sincere they will refuse 
to interfere (for moral suasion is not interference) with 
a white-slaver who runs off with one of their daughters or 
a blackhander who kidnaps and tortures a little child or 
a ruffian who slaps the wife or mother of one of them in 
the face. They are utterly insincere unless they decline 
to take advantage of police protection from burglary or 
highway robbery. Of course if such a man is really con- 
scientious he cannot profit or allow his family to profit in 
any way by the safety secured to him and them by others, 
by soldiers in time of war, by judges and policemen in 
time of peace ; for the receiver is as bad as the thief. I 
hold that such an attitude is infamous; and it is just as 
infamous to refuse to serve the country in arms during 
this war. If a man's conscience bids him so to act, then 
his conscience is a fit subject for the student of morbid 
pathology. 

If a man does not wish to take life, but does wish to 
serve his country, let him serve on board a mine-sweeper 
or in some other position where the danger is to his 
own life and not to the life of any one else. But if he will 
take no useful and efficient part in helping in this war, in 
running his share of the common risk, and doing his 
part of the common duty, then treat him as having for- 
feited his right to vote. He has no right to help render at 
the polls any decision which in the long run can only be 
made good in the face of brutal and hostile men by the 

290 



THE "CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR" 

ability and willingness of good citizens to back right with 
might. 

The case has been admirably put by the Methodist 
Bishop, R. J. Cooke, of Helena, Montana. He points out 
that the vast majority of these conscientious objectors do 
not object to receiving the benefits from the suffering, 
hardships and deaths of other men; they only object to 
doing anything in return. Such a conscientious objector 
gives no service in return for the value he receives. He 
claims citizenship, but will not perform the duty of a citi- 
zen. Now, he has no moral right to take such a twofold 
position. "If any man will not work neither shall he eat." 
If his conscience forbids him to work, do not violate his 
conscience, but refuse to feed ?iim at the expense of some- 
body with a healthy conscience which does not forbid 
work. Service to the nation in war stands precisely on a 
footing with any other service. If a man will not perform 
it, let him lose all the benefits of war; and therefore let 
him lose the political rights which a free country can keep 
only if its free citizens are willing to fight for them. Re- 
spect the conscientious objector's opinions, but let him 
abide by the full consequences of his opinions. Universal 
suflFrage can be justified only if it rests on universal 
service. We stand against all privilege not based on the 
full performance of duty ; and there is no more contempt- 
ible form of privilege than the privilege of existing in 
smug, self-righteous, peaceful safety because other, braver, 
more self-sacrificing men give up safety and go to war to 
preserve the nation. If a man is too conscientious to 
fight then the rest of us ought to be too conscientious to 
let him vote in a democratic land which can permanently 
exist only if the average man is willing in the last resort 
to fight for it, and die for it. A man has no right to the 
things that do not belong to him; and this country does 

291 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

not belong to the men who will not defend her. The 
man who will not defend the country has no business to 
vote in the country. Extreme Quakers take this posi- 
tion. They refuse to vote or pay taxes, in addition to 
refusing to fight. Such men are unwise, but consistent. 
But nothing can be said for the pacifist who wishes to 
vote, but refuses to fight. 

Monsignor Cassidy of St. Mary's Cathedral, Fall 
River, Massachusetts, in an address to a body of Massa- 
chusetts troops who were about to leave for the war, 
said: "The future would be filled with shame and 
ignominy if we had been led by those who would have 
peace at any price ; we should have been a soulless nation, 
and shame and reproach and everlasting infamy would 
have been the profit of our peace. But the nation did 
not sell its soul for peace! In the spirit of ''jd we fight 
for peace, that justice may prevail, that f rightfulness and 
inhumanity may not possess the earth." 

There spoke a true American, fit interpreter of the 
soul of America! 



292 



APPENDIX E 

The Hun Within Our Gates 

The Hun within our gates is the worst of the foes of 
our own household, whether he is the paid or the un- 
paid agent of Germany. Whether he is pro-German or 
poses as a pacifist, or a peace-at-any-price man, matters 
Httle. He is the enemy of the United States. Senators 
and Congressmen Hke Messrs. Stone, La Follette and 
Maclemore belong in Germany and it is a pity they 
cannot be sent there, as Vallandigham was sent to the 
hostile lines by Lincoln during the Civil War. Such 
men are among the worst of the foes of our own house- 
hold; and so are the sham philanthropists and sinister 
agitators and the wealthy creatures without patriotism 
who support and abet them. Our Government has 
seemed afraid to grapple with these people. It is per- 
mitting thousands of allies of Berlin to sow the seeds of 
treason and sedition in this country. The I. W. W. 
boasts its defiance of all law, and many of its members 
exultingly proclaim that in their war against industry in 
the United States they are endeavoring to give the Gov- 
ernment so much to do that it will have no troops to spare 
for Europe. Every district where the I. W. W. starts 
rioting should be placed under martial law, and cleaned 
up by military methods. The German-language papers 
carry on a consistent campaign in favor of Germany 
against England. They should be put out of existence for 
the period of this war. The Hearst papers, more ably 
edited than the German sheets, play the Kaiser's game in 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

a similar way. When they keep within the law they 
should at least be made to feel the scorn felt for them 
by every honest American. Wherever any editor can 
be shown to be purveying treason in violation of law 
he should be jailed until the conflict is over. Every dis- 
loyal German-born citizen should have his naturalization 
papers recalled and should be interned during the term of 
the war. Action of this kind is especially necessary in 
order to pick out the disloyal but vociferous minority of 
citizens of German descent from the vast but silent ma- 
jority of entirely loyal citizens of German descent who 
otherwise will suffer from a public anger that will con- 
demn all alike. Every disloyal native-born American 
should be disfranchised and interned. It is time to strike 
our enemies at home heavily and quickly. Every copper- 
head in this country is an enemy to the Government, to 
the people, to the army and to the flag, and should be 
treated as such. 

. This pro-German, anti-American propaganda has been 
carried on for years prior to the war, and its treasonable 
activities are performed systematically to-day. The 
great majority of the men and women of German 
blood, are absolutely good Americans, and we owe 
it just as much to them as to the rest of our fellow 
countrymen with the utmost severity to suppress the tens 
of thousands of Germans and German-Americans who, 
having taken the oath of allegiance, yet intrigue and con- 
spire against the United States and do their utmost to 
promote the success of Germany and to weaken the de- 
fense of this nation. These men support and direct the 
pro-German societies. They incite disloyal activities 
among the Russian Jews. They finance the small groups 
of Irish-Americans whose hatred for England makes them 
traitors to the United States. They foment seditious 

294 



THE HUN WITHIN OUR GATES 

operations among the German-American socialists and 
the I. W. W.'s. They support the German-language peri- 
odicals. Their campaigns range from peace movements 
and anti-draft schemings to open efforts in favor of sedi- 
tion and civil war. 

These traitors are following out the vicious teachings 
of Prussian philosophers ; there is no cause for surprise 
at their treasonable course. Unfortunately there is 
cause for surprise at the license which the Administra- 
tion extends to their detestable activities. In this atti- 
tude the Administration is repeating its course of indiffer- 
ence to world-threatening aggression, and of submission 
to studied acts of murderous violence, which resulted, 
after two and a half years of injury and humiliation, in 
our being dragged unprepared into war. 

If during those two and a half years a policy of 
courage, and of consistent and far-sighted Americanism, 
had been followed, either the brutal invasion of our na- 
tional rights would have been checked without war or else 
if we had been forced into war we would have brought it 
instantly to a victorious end. Our failure to prepare is 
responsible for our failure now efficiently to act in the 
war. In exactly the same fashion it may be set down as 
certain that continuance of the present craven policy of 
ignoring sedition and paltering with treason will en- 
courage and aid German autocracy, and will be trans- 
lated either into terrible lists of Americans slain and 
crippled on the battlefield or else into an ignoble peace 
which will leave Germany free at some future time to re- 
sume its campaign against America and against liberty- 
loving mankind. 



295 



APPENDIX F 

Nine-tenths of Wisdom is Being Wise in Time 
(Part of Speech at Lincoln, Nebraska, June 14, 1917) 

In the past there have been two great crises in 
our national life : that in which the infant nation was 
saved by the soldierly valor and single-minded 
statesmanship of Washington, and that in which, 
in its raw maturity, the nation was again saved by the 
men who followed Lincoln and Grant. In each case the 
victory was followed by over half a century of national 
unity, secured by the peace of victory; and during this 
peace, brought by the victory of righteousness, men for- 
got that all its benefits would be lost if it were turned 
into the peace of cowardice and slackness. The Revolu- 
tion was a war for liberty; and that liberty became of 
permanent value only when, again under Washington's 
lead, it was made secure by the orderly strength of the 
Union. The liberty secured in the Civil War to the 
black man was thus secured only because the white man 
was willing to fight to the death for the Union, and for 
the flag to which we owe undivided allegiance. 

The old thirteen states were born of the Revolution. 
Nebraska, like Kansas, was born of the Civil War. It 
was the struggle over the admission to statehood of 
Kansas and Nebraska which marked the real opening of 
the contest that culminated at Appomatox. 

The contest settled three great principles : 

I. That we were no longer to make words substitutes 
for facts, or accept fine phrases in lieu of great deeds ; and 

296 



WISDOM IN BEING WISE IN TIME 

that therefore we were to make our devotion to liberty a 
fact instead of a phrase by abolishing slavery. 

2. That we were all hereafter to be Americans with 
an undivided allegiance to the flag of the Union ; an alle- 
giance even more incompatible with a loyalty divided be- 
tween our flag and some foreign flag than with a loyalty 
divided between the whole country and some section of 
the country. 

3. That we were definitely to realize that while peace 
was normally a good thing, yet that righteousness stood 
above peace, and that the only good citizens were those 
who were sternly ready to face war rather than submit 
to an unrighteous or cowardly peace. 

All these principles are at stake at the present moment. 
All three have been threatened, and therefore the honor 
and the welfare and the usefulness and, indeed, the very 
life of the Republic have been threatened by the pacifist 
and pro-German agitation of the last three years. 

Our national record during these three years is not one 
to which we can look back with pride; for during these 
three years we violated the three principles established by 
the Civil War. 

I. For two years and a half we used fine phrases to 
cover ugly facts, when we unctuously protested our de- 
votion to the liberties of small, well-behaved nations in 
the abstract, and yet, in the concrete did not say one 
word of indignant protest when with ruthless brutality, 
and without one shadow of moral justification, Germany 
conquered and enslaved Belgium. We did not even dare 
to act when our own innocent women and children and 
unarmed men lost their lives on the high seas, and when 
their murder was insolently justified by the tyrannous 
Prussianized autocracy which now menaces the entire 
peace-loving and liberty-loving world. 

297 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

2. We permitted our national policy to be swayed by 
the national devotions and national antipathies of men 
who exercised the rights of American citizens but who 
showed themselves traitors to America by the way in 
which they prostituted our citizenship to the interests of 
Germany, or to their hatred of England; men whose 
allegiance to this country was merely one of the lips, 
while in their hearts their loyalty was wholly given to 
Germany, or else to any and every enemy of England, 
even although that enemy was also an enemy of the 
United States and of mankind. Such disloyalty was 
quite as mischievous as, and far less excusable than, sec- 
tional disloyalty. 

3. It would be impossible to overstate the damage done 
to the moral fiber of our country by the professional 
pacifist propaganda, the peace-at-any-price propaganda, 
which had been growing in strength for the previous de- 
cade and which for the first two and a half years of the 
war was potent in influencing us as a people to play a 
part which was wholly unworthy of the teachings of the 
great men of our past. The professional pacifist move- 
ment was heavily financed by certain big capitalists. 
This was not merely admitted but blazoned abroad by 
some among them; whereas the accusations that the 
munition makers or any other interested persons, played 
any important part in the movement for preparedness 
were malicious falsehoods, well known to be such by 
those who uttered them. The professional pacifists dur- 
ing these two and a half years have occupied precisely 
the position of the copperheads during the time of 
Abraham Lincoln. 

We now pay the same tribute of respect to the men 
who fought for their convictions in the Civil War, 
whether they wore the blue or the gray — kinsmen of 

298 



WISDOM IN BEING WISE IN TIME 

mine were in the Union army, and other kinsmen of 
mine in the Confederate army, and I am equally proud 
of both. But nobody is proud of the copperheads, who 
exalted peace above righteousness; and the professional 
pacifists of to-day are their spiritual heirs. 

At last, thank Heaven, we came to our senses, realized 
our shortcomings, and tardily did our duty. At last we 
spurned the mean counsels of timidity and folly. At last 
we showed that we were not too proud to fight; and we 
have reversed and repudiated the mean and base proposal 
to secure peace without victory. At last we took up the 
challenge which Germany had, with equal brutality and 
contempt, so often hurled in our faces. At last we deter- 
mined to make our loyalty to this nation's past and to the 
welfare of humanity, a matter of deeds and not merely 
of empty words. We have entered the great war for the 
future of civilization ; and now that we are at war it be- 
hooves us to bear ourselves like men. 

We are utterly unprepared. The things we are now 
doing, even when well done, are things which we ought to 
have begun doing three years ago. We can now only 
partially offset our folly in failing to prepare during 
these last three years, in failing to heed the lesson 
writ large across the skies in letters of flame and blood. 
Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time ! 
Now we must fight without proper preparation. But 
we must prepare as well as we can at this late date ; and 
the most important of all forms of preparedness is 
spiritual preparedness. 

First of all we must sternly insist that all our people 
practice the patriotism of service, and that we all give 
a fervid and undivided loyalty to our common country. 
Patriotism is an affair of deeds, and patriotic words are 
good only in so far as they result in deeds. If phrase- 

299 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

making and oratory, whether by pubHc servants or by 
outsiders, are treated as substitutes for deeds, the result 
is unmixed mischief. We read Lincoln's Gettysburg 
speech and Second Inaugural, only because his words 
were made good by his deeds, only because he threw 
aside all considerations other than the welfare of the 
nation, and with steadfast efficiency fought to the end 
for freedom and for the preservation of the Union. 

As it was with that very great man in the past, so it 
must be with us lesser men in the present. Unless we 
now, at this moment, in this war, strive each of us to 
serve the country according to our several abilities, we 
are false to the memories of the nation-builders to whose 
sagacity and prowess we owe the creation of this state 
fifty years ago. Nebraska was founded as a State of 
the Union only because there were in the nation at that 
time enough men who were willing to do and dare and 
die at need for the Union. To-day likewise, the instant 
and overwhelming need of the nation is for men who 
will serve in arms, and if necessary die, for the nation; 
and next to this is the need for the men and women who 
will put our entire industrial and agricultural strength 
back of the fighting men in the field. Only the men and 
women who do this are true patriots; for patriotism 
means service to the nation; and only those who render 
such service are fit to enjoy the privilege of citizenship. 

We cannot render such service if our loyalty is in 
even the smallest degree divided between this and any 
other nation. There must be no division within our own 
ranks along the lines of creed or national origin; and 
any citizen of this country who uses his citizenship in the 
interest of some other country is a traitor to the United 
States. It is not merely our right, but our high duty, to 
insist on this fact. Twice over a century ago we fought 

300 



WISDOM IN BEING WISE IN TIME 

Great Britain. In each contest the great majority of the 
citizens of British descent took the lead and proved that 
they were Americans and nothing else. Those who did 
not so act were traitors. Now we are at war with Ger- 
many; and every citizen of German blood is bound in 
this contest to show the same whole-hearted Ameri- 
canism in support of the United States against Germany 
that was shown in 1776 and 1812 by the Americans of 
British descent in the contests with Great Britain. To 
act otherwise is to be guilty of treason. 

In the Revolutionary War the British armies who 
strove against our liberties were aided by powerful bodies 
of German auxiliaries. One of Washington's most 
famous victories, that at Trenton, was gained purely over 
Germans; and his first military experience was against 
the French. But it would be unworthy folly now to 
inveigh against Germany because a hundred and forty 
years ago she furnished mercenary troops for our sub- 
jugation; or to inveigh against the French because they 
were the bitter foes of our people in colonial days. It 
is precisely as unworthy, precisely as silly and wicked, 
now to nourish hatred against England. Washington's 
troops included men of English and Irish, of German 
and French, blood. But they were Americans and noth- 
ing else ! They did not ask whether they were to fight 
English, French, or Germans. They fought the foes of 
the American flag, whoever these foes might be. 

This must be our spirit to-day. We are a different 
people from any people of Europe. It is our boast that 
we admit the immigrant to full fellowship and equality 
with the native born. In return we demand that he shall 
share our undivided allegiance to the one flag which 
floats over all of us. The events of the last few years 
have conclusively shown that the man, whether of Ger- 

301 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

man, or of any other origin, who attempts to combine 
allegiance to this country with allegiance to another, is 
necessarily false to this country. 

In this country we must have but one flag, the Ameri- 
can flag; but one language, the Enghsh language; and 
above all, but one loyalty, an exclusive and undivided 
loyalty to the United States, with no Lot's wife attitude, 
no looking back to the various Old World countries from 
which our ancestors have severally come. 

Now for the lesson of preparedness — military and 
economic, spiritual and material. As yet, nearly five 
months after Germany declared war on us, we have not 
so much as a division of troops ready for action. As 
yet we are utterly helpless to act in our own defense. The 
fault lies primarily in our complete failure to prepare 
during the last three years since the great war opened. 
Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time! We have 
not been wise in time; and now we rely on our allies to 
protect us from the effect of our folly. Just think of 
what Germany would have done to us within the first 
month — not to speak of the first four months — after we 
broke off diplomatic relations with her if we had not 
been able to shield our feeble and short-sighted unreadi- 
ness behind the navy of Great Britain and the armies of 
the allies. We owe our ignoble safety to the British 
fleet, and the French and English armies. We escape 
paying an utterly ruinous payment for our folly only be- 
cause the soldiers and sailors of our allies pay for it 
with their lives. Uncle Sam is in the undignified position 
of the man who gets on a street car and then fumbles in 
his pocket while somebody else pays his fare. 

If we had been willing to prepare, and if we had 
showed that we meant what we said, we would probably 
have prevented the war, and would certainly have brought 

302 



WISDOM IN BEING WISE IN TIME 

it to a close as soon as we entered it. Now, friends, 
there is no use crying over spilt milk. But it is even 
worse to make believe that the milk was not spilt. The 
important thing is to face the fact of the spilling and re- 
solve that it shall not be spilt again. Let us act in the 
spirit of the words of Abraham Lincoln at the close of 
the Civil War : "Human nature will not change. In any 
future great national trial, compared with the men of 
this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and 
as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the 
incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, 
and none of them as wrongs to be revenged." Let us 
manfully acknowledge how great have been our short- 
comings for the last few years, and then let us, without 
a particle of revengeful or recriminatory or uncharitable 
feeling, learn from them wisdom to be applied in our 
future conduct. From this time on let us insist on an 
absolute and undivided Americanism in this land, un- 
tempered by any half allegiance to the countries from 
which our ancestors may severally have sprung, and un- 
tainted by any unworthy national animosity towards any 
other country. Let us prepare ourselves spiritually, eco- 
nomically, and in all military and naval matters — includ- 
ing as a permanent policy the policy of universal military 
training and service — so that never again shall we be 
utterly unready, as we now are, to meet a great crisis. 
Finally, in the present war, a war for liberty and de- 
mocracy against the ruthless militaristic tyranny of the 
Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns, let us as 
speedily as possible train our giant, but our soft and un- 
ready, strength, so that we may use our hardened might 
to bring the slaughter to an end in the only way 
honorably possible, by securing for ourselves and our 
allies the peace of justice based on overwhelming victory. 

303 



APPENDIX G 

Correspondence with the President and the 
Secretary of War 

Metropolitan 

492 Fourth Avenue, New York 

February 2, 19 17. 
Sir: 

I have already on file in your Department, my ap- 
plication to be permitted to raise a Division of In- 
fantry, with a divisional brigade of cavalry in the event 
of war (possibly with the permission to make one or 
two of the brigades of infantry, mounted infantry). 
In view of the recent German note, and of the fact that 
my wife and I are booked to sail next week for a month 
in Jamaica, I respectfully write you as follows : 

If you believe that there will be war, and a call for 
volunteers to go to war immediately, I respectfully and 
earnestly request that you notify me at once, so that I 
may not sail. Otherwise, I shall sail, and in such case, 
I respectfully request that if or when it becomes certain 
that we will have war, and that there will be a call for 
volunteers to go to war, you will direct that a telegram 
be sent to me, at the Metropolitan Magazine office. 
New York, from whence a cable will be sent me to 
Jamaica, and I shall immediately return. I have pre- 
pared the skeleton outline of what I have desired the 5 
Division to be, and what men I should recommend to 
the Department, for brigade and regimental com- 

304 



CORRESPONDENCE 

manders, Chief of Staff, Chief Surgeon, Quartermaster 
General, etc., etc. The men whom I would desire for 
officers and enlisted men are, for the most part, men 
earning their living in the active business of life, who 
would be glad to go to war at their country's call, but 
who could not be expected, and who would probably 
refuse, to drop their business and see their families em- 
barrassed, unless there is war, and the intention to send 
them to war. So it is not possible for me to do much 
more in the way of preliminary action than I have 
already done, until I have official directions. 

Very respectfully, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

Hon. Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War, 
Washington, D. C. 



Washington, February 3, 191 7. 
Dear Sir: 

I have received your letter of February 2. No situa- 
tion has arisen which would justify my suggesting a 
postponement of the trip you propose. Your letter and 
its suggestion will be filed for consideration should oc- 
casion arise. 

Very respectfully yours, 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War. 

Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 
432 Fourth Avenue, 
New York City. 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

Metropolitan 
432 Fourth Avenue, New York 

February 7, 1917. 
Sir: 

I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter, informing 
me that I could go on my trip to Jamaica. It had crossed 
my letter to you informing you, that in view of the Presi- 
dent having broken off diplomatic relations with Ger- 
many, I should of course abandon my trip. 

In the event of being allowed to raise a division, I 
should of course strain every nerve to have it ready for 
efficient action at the earliest moment, so that it could 
be sent across with the first expeditionary force, if the 
Department were willing. With this end in view, I am de- 
sirous of making all preparations that are possible inj 
advance. I have intended, in the event of being allowed] 
to raise a division, to request the Department to appoint; 
Captain Frank McCoy, of the regular army, as my divi-' 
sional Chief of Staff, with the rank of Colonel. Would 
it be proper for me to ask that he be permitted now to 
come on and see me here, so that I may immediately go 
over with him all the questions that it is possible to go 
over at this time, in connection with raising the division ? 
Very respectfully yours, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Hon. Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War, 
Washington, D. C. 

War Department 

Washington, February 9, 19 17. 
Sir: 

I beg to acknowledge receipt, yesterday, of your letter 
of the 7th instant. 



CORRESPONDENCE 

In reply to your patriotic suggestion that in due time 
you be authorized to raise a division of troops for service 
abroad and that it is your desire, in anticipation of that 
authority, to take certain preliminary steps, I have to 
state the limitations under which the War Department 
is in respect to this matter. 

No action in the direction suggested by you can be 
taken without the express sanction of Congress. Should 
the contingency occur which you have in mind, it is to 
be expected that Congress will complete its legislation 
relating to volunteer forces and provide, under its own 
conditions, for the appointment of officers for the higher 
commands. 

Very respectfully, 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War. 
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 
432 Fourth Avenue, 
New York City. 

Telegram 

March 19, 1917. 
To the Secretary of War, 
Washington, D. C: 
In view of the fact that Germany is now actually en- 
gaged in war with us, I again earnestly ask permission 
to be allowed to raise a division for immediate service at 
the front. My purpose would be after some six weeks 
preliminary training here to take it direct to France for 
intensive training so that it could be sent to the front in 
the shortest possible time to whatever point was desired. 
I should of course ask no favors of any kind except that 
the division be put in the fighting line at the earliest pos- 
sible moment. If the Department will allow me to as- 

307 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

semble the division at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and will give 
me what aid it can, and will furnish arms and supplies 
as it did for the early Plattsburg camps, I will raise the 
money to prepare the division until Congress can act, 
and we shall thereby gain a start of over a month in 
making ready. I would like to be authorized to raise 
three three-regiment brigades of infantry, one brigade of 
cavalry, one brigade of artillery, one regiment of engi- 
neers, one motorcycle machine-gun regiment, one aero 
squadron, and of course the supply branches, and so 
forth. As Captain McCoy whom I asked to have detailed 
to me as Chief of Staff has been sent to Mexico, I would 
ask that Captain Moseley be immediately assigned me 
as Chief of Staff and Lieutenant Colonel Allen, Major 
Howze and Major Harbord as brigade commanders. I 
would further ask for one regular officer of less rank, 
whose names I will suggest to you, for about every eight 
hundred or one thousand men in the division. 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

Telegram 
Washington, D. C, March 20, 1917. 
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt: 

Your telegram March nineteenth arrived. No addi- 
tional armies can be raised without the specific authority 
of Congress which by its act of February 2y, 1906, has 
also prohibited any executive department or other gov- 
ernment establishment of the United States to involve 
the Government in any contract or other obligation for 
the future payment of moneys in excess of appropriations 
unless such contract or obligation is authorized by law. 
A plan for a very much larger army than the force sug- 
gested in your telegram has been prepared for the action 
of Congress whenever required. Militia officers of high 

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CORRESPONDENCE 

rank will naturally be incorporated with their commands, 
but the general officers for all volunteer forces are 
to be drawn from the regular army. 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War. 

Sagamore Hill, March 23, 19 17. 
To the Secretary of War, 
Sir: 

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your 
telegram in answer to my telegram of the nineteenth, 
and will govern myself accordingly. 

I understand, Sir, that there would be a far larger 
force than a division called out; I merely wished, to be 
permitted to get ready a division for immediate use in 
the first expeditionary force sent over. 

In reference to your concluding sentence, I wish re- 
spectfully to point out that I am a retired Commander- 
in-Chief of the United States Army, and eligible to any 
position of command over American troops to which I 
may be appointed. As for my fitness for command of 
troops, I respectfully refer you to my three immediate 
superiors in the field, Lieutenant-General S. B. M. Young 
(retired), Major-General Samuel Sumner (retired), and 
Major-General Leonard Wood. In the Santiago cam- 
paign I served in the first fight as commander, first of the 
right wing, and then of the left wing of the regiment; 
in the next, the big fight, as colonel of the regiment ; and 
I ended the campaign in command of the brigade. 

The regiment, First United States Volunteer Cavalry, 
in which I first served as lieutenant-colonel, and which 
I then commanded as colonel, was raised, armed, 
equipped, drilled, mounted, dismounted, kept for two 
weeks on a transport, and then put through two vic- 

309 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

torious aggressive fights, in which we lost a third of the 
officers, and a fifth of the enlisted men, all within a little 
over fifty days. 

I have the honor to be, 

Very respectfully yours, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

The Secretary of War 

Washington, March 26, 19 17. 
My dear Mr. President: * 

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your 
letter of the twenty-third. The military record to which 
you call my attention is, of course, a part of the perma- 
nent records of this Department and is available, in de- 
tail, for consideration. 

The patriotic spirit of your suggestion is cordially 
appreciated. 

Respectfully yours, 

Newton D. Baker. 

Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 

Sagamore Hill. 

Oyster Bay, April 12, 191 7. 
My dear Mr. Secretary: 

First, let me say how greatly I enjoyed our conversa- 
tion the other day, and how much I appreciate your cour- 
tesy in calling upon me. 

I enclose, in accordance with our conversation, copy of 
the letter I have just sent to Congressman Dent and to 
Senator Chamberlain. If there is any way in which you 
can suggest that I can be of further help to the Adminis- 
tration as regards your obligatory service bill, or as re- 
gards the loan, pray command me. 

There is one point I did not have a chance to discuss 
with you, but I suppose it is hardly necessary. If I were 

* Sic; of course, an error; for "Mr. Roaserelt." 

310 



CORRESPONDENCE 

a younger man I would be entirely content to go in any 
position, as a second lieutenant, or as a private in the 
force. With my age I cannot do good service, however, 
unless as a general officer. I remember when I went to 
the Spanish War there was talk about rejecting me on 
account of my eyes; but, of course, even in the position 
I then went in, it was nonsense to reject me for any such 
reason. To the position which I now seek, of course, 
the physical examination does not apply, so long as I 
am fit to do the work, which I certainly can do — that is 
enlisting the best type of fighting men, and putting into 
them the spirit which will enable me to get the best possi- 
ble results out of them in the actual fight. Hindenberg, 
was of course, a retired officer, who had been for years 
on the retired list, and who could not physically have 
passed an examination. I am not a Hindenberg; but I 
can raise and handle this division in a way that will do 
credit to the American people, and to you, and to the 
President. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Hon. Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War, 
Washington, D. C. 

War Department 

Washington, April 13, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Roosevelt: 

I have thought earnestly about the subject of our con- 
versation the night before last, and have reached some 
conclusions which I think, in frankness, I ought to indi- 
cate to you. 

The War College Division of the General Staff has re- 

311 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

peatedly reaffirmed a recommendation to me in the fol- 
lowing language : 

"The War College Division earnestly recommends that 
no American troops be employed in active service in any 
European theater until after an adequate period of train- 
ing, and that during this period all available trained offi- 
cers and men in the Regular Army or National Guard 
be employed in training the new levies called into service. 
It should, therefore, be our policy at first to devote all 
our energies to raising troops in sufficient numbers to 
exert a substantial influence in a later stage of the war. 
Partially trained troops will be entirely unfit for such 
duty, and even if our regular forces and National Guard 
could be spared from training duty, their number is too 
small to exert any influence." 

This policy I have a number of times approved. It is, 
of course, a purely military policy, and does not under- 
take to estimate what, if any, sentimental value would 
attach to a representation of the United States in France 
by a former President of the United States, but there 
are doubtless other ways in which that value could be 
contributed apart from a military expedition. 

Cooperation between the United States and the En- 
tente Allies has not yet been so far planned as that any 
decision has been reached upon the subject of sending 
an expeditionary force; but should any such force be 
sent, I should feel obliged to urge that it be placed under 
the command of the ablest and most experienced profes- 
sional military man in our country, and that it be offi- 
cered by and composed of men selected because of their 
previous military training and, as far as possible, actual 
military experience. My judgment reaches this conclu- 
sion for the reason that any such expedition will be made 
up of young Americans who will be sent to expose their 

312 



CORRESPONDENCE 

lives in the bloodiest war yet fought in the world, and 
under conditions of warfare involving applications of 
science to the art, of such a character that the very- 
highest degree of skill and training and the largest ex- 
perience are needed for their guidance and protection. 
I could not reconcile my mind to a recommendation which 
deprived our soldiers of the most experienced leadership 
available, in deference to any mere sentimental consid- 
eration, nor could I consent to any expedition being sent 
until its members had been seasoned by most thorough 
training for the hardships which they would have to en- 
dure. I believe, too, that should any expeditionary force 
be sent by the United States, it should appear from every 
aspect of it that military considerations alone had deter- 
mined its composition, and I think this appearance would 
be given rather by the selection of the officers from the 
men of the Army who have devoted their lives exclu- 
sively to the study and pursuit of military matters and 
have made a professional study of the recent changes in 
the art of war. I should, therefore, be obliged to with- 
hold my approval from an expedition of the sort you 
propose. 

I say these things, my dear Mr. Roosevelt, as the re- 
sult of very earnest reflection, and because I think you 
will value a frank expression of my best judgment rather 
than an apparent acquiescence in a plan which I do not 
approve, drawn from my failure to comment. 

With assurance of appreciation of your patriotic inten- 
tions, I beg leave, with great respect, to remain. 

Sincerely yours, 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War. 
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 

Oyster Bay, N. Y. 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 



Metropolitan 

432 Fourth Avenue, New York 

April 22, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Secretary: 

I thank you for your very frank and courteous letter 
of April 13th. Of course, my dear sir, you wish me to 
write with equal frankness in return, and I gladly do 
so. Since the German message of January 31st, which 
was practically a declaration of war, I have scrupu- 
lously refrained from public criticism of the Administra- 
tion, keeping silent when I could not support it ; but your 
letter makes it incumbent on me to speak plainly. 

My whole purpose is to help make good the President's 
message. If we make it good by efficient and speedy 
action it will rank with the great state papers of our 
history. Otherwise, it wall amount to nothing. I have 
ungrudgingly and whole-heartedly backed up the Admin- 
istration's plans. There was much about these plans of 
which I entirely disapproved, but I did not wish to mar 
the support I was giving the President by anything pub- 
lic in the way of criticism. I felt that the employment 
of the national guard was a mistake ; but I said nothing. 
I did, however, feel it imperative (without uttering one 
word of criticism of your plans) to make a strong ap- 
peal for the additional use of volunteers who would 
otherwise be exempt from service, for immediate service 
at the front. Not to make such use of them is in my 
opinion a capital mistake. 

You say that only "military considerations" should gov- 
ern your action. In that event I am unable to understand 
the effort to continue to utilize the national guard, when 
the actual experience on the border has shown that the 

314 



CORRESPONDENCE 

attempt to do what was done in Mexico (and what it 
is now proposed to do in Europe), with the national 
guard inevitably produces waste, extravagance, military 
inefficiency and cruel injustice. Last summer you tried 
to mobilize the guard. You were not able to mobilize 
much more than half of it; and of this half three-fifths 
had practically no training, and only one-fifth could shoot. 
Nothing more completely divorced from sound military 
policy can be imagined than this attempt to utilize the 
national guard. Did the General Staff protest against 
it? If so, their protest must have been over-ridden for 
non-military reasons. If they did not protest, and if 
they do not now protest, their advice on other military 
matters must be regarded as discredited in advance. In 
this letter of yours you say that only officers of the regu- 
lar army (Army officers "who have devoted their lives 
exclusively to military matters") are to be sent on an 
expeditionary force. Yet the officers of the national 
guard are certainly called out on the theory that they 
are to be sent to the front. Some of them doubtless will 
be glad not to go. But many admirable men among them 
are eager to go ; and it is a wrong to force them to aban- 
don their business and go into camp when there is no 
serious intention to use them for the serious work that 
alone would justify requesting them to make the sacri- 
fices they have made. 

I wish to point out another thing. You decline my 
application on the ground of lack of military training 
and experience; and yet you are summoning, and have 
summoned, to the field, numbers of military officers, as 
division and brigade commanders, who have not had 
one-tenth my experience. My dear sir, you forget that 
I have commanded troops in action in the most important 
battle fought by the United States Army during the last 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

half century, and that I have commanded a brigade in 
the campaign of which this battle was an incident. 

I most heartily favor universal obligatory military 
training and service, not only as regards this war, but 
as a permanent policy of the Government. Selective 
obligatory military service, as a "temporary" expedient, 
is better than having resort only to volunteering; but it 
is a mischievous error to use it in order to prevent all 
volunteering. Universal obligatory service, as a perma- 
nent policy, is absolutely just, fair, democratic and effi- 
cient. But it needs a period of perhaps two years in 
order to produce first-class results; and so does the 
"selective" substitute for it. It is folly not to provide by 
volunteering for the action that ought to be taken dur- 
ing these two years. (Volunteering to serve in the ranks 
of the regular army and national guard, of course, in no 
way meets the need.) 

The vice of the volunteer system lies chiefly, not in 
the men who do volunteer, but in the men who don't. A 
chief, although not the only, merit in the obligatory 
system lies in its securing preparedness in advance. By 
our folly in not adopting the obligatory system as soon 
as this war broke out, we have forfeited this prime 
benefit of preparedness. You now propose to use its 
belated adoption as an .excuse for depriving us of the 
benefits of the volunteer system. This is a very grave 
blunder. The only right course under existing condi- 
tions is to combine the two systems. My proposal is 
to use the volunteer system so that we can at once avail 
ourselves of the services of men who would otherwise 
be exempt, and to use the obligatory as the permanent 
system as to make all serve who ought to serve. You 
propose to use the belated adoption of the obligatory 
system as a reason for refusing the services of half the 

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men of the nation who are most fit to serve, who are 
most eager to serve, and whose services can be utilized 
at once. 

You quote with approval the recommendation of cer- 
tain of your military advisers to the effect that no ex- 
peditionary force should soon be sent across to fight. 
They wish instead that "all the available trained officers 
and men in the regular army and national guard be 
employed in training the new levies" so as to exert a 
substantial influence in a "later stage of the war." You 
add that, as this is the proper "military policy," you do 
not think it should be departed from for any "senti- 
mental value" or "sentimental consideration." I have 
not asked you to consider any "sentimental value" in 
this matter. I am speaking of moral effect, not of 
sentimental value. Sentimentality is as different from 
morality as Rousseau's life from Abraham Lincoln's. 
I have just received a letter from James Bryce urging 
"the dispatch of an American force to the theater of 
war" and saying, "The moral effect of the appearance 
in the war line of an American force would be im- 
mense." From representatives of the French and 
British Governments, and of the French, British and 
Canadian military authorities, I have received state- 
ments to the same effect, in even more emphatic form, 
and earnest hopes that I myself should be in the force. 
Apparently your military advisers in this matter seek 
to persuade you that a "military policy" has nothing 
to do with "moral effect." If so, their militarism is 
like that of the Aulic Council of Vienna in the Na- 
poleonic Wars, and not like that of Napoleon, who 
stated that in war the moral was to the material as two 
to one. These advisers will do well to follow the teach- 
ings of Napoleon and not those of the pedantic mili- 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

tarists of the Aulic Council, who were the helpless vic- 
tims of Napoleon. 

If we had been wise enough to begin thorough- 
going preparations two and a half years ago, after this 
great war broke out, and if, as the main feature thereof, 
we had introduced the principle of obligatory universal 
military training and service (and had also done such 
elementary things as running the Springfield factory at 
full speed, in which case we would now be a million 
rifles to the good), there would be scant need of a 
volunteer force now, for we would have been able to put a 
couple of million men, well armed and equipped, into the 
field, and would have finished this war at once. Nine- 
tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. But we were 
not wise in time. We did not prepare in advance the 
instruments which would alone be thoroughly satisfac- 
tory, and which cannot possibly be improvised to meet 
immediate needs. Therefore, let us use every instru- 
ment that is available to meet the immediate needs. 
Let us not advance our unwisdom in the past as a 
justification for fresh unwisdom in the present. If 
the people of a town do not prepare a fire company 
until a fire breaks out, they are foolish. But they are 
more foolish still if when the fire breaks out, they then 
decline to try to put it out with any means at hand, on 
the ground that they prefer to wait and drill a fire com- 
pany. Your military advisers are now giving you pre- 
cisely such advice. Put out the fire with the means 
available, and at the same time start the drill of the 
fire company! 

Our nation has not prepared in any adequate way 
during the last two and a half years to meet the crisis 
which now faces us. You, therefore, propose that we 
shall pay billions of dollars to the allies to do our 

318 



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fighting for us, while we stay here in comfort and 
slowly proceed to train an army to fight in the end, 
unless the war is over, one way or the other, before 
our army is ready. This is exactly as if after Sumter 
was fired on, Lincoln had demanded a draft and de- 
clined to use volunteers in the interval. In such a case 
he would have doubtless had a good army in a year. 
But it would then have been useless because the Union 
would meanwhile have been destroyed. Or take the 
history of the past three years. In 1914 the British 
were unprepared. They were not nearly as unprepared 
as we now are, but inasmuch as their danger was far 
greater (for we have been safe behind the British fleet 
and the allied armies) their short-sightedness was prob- 
ably as blameworthy as ours. For some years Lord 
Roberts had been preaching universal obligatory mili- 
tary training and service. They declined to profit by 
his preaching, and war came upon them. In conse- 
quence they were wholly unfit to do in the military way 
what they are now doing and what Germany and 
France could then do. They immediately sent abroad, 
however, a small military force which fought valiantly. 
They followed it by volunteer armies as rapidly as 
possible. They accepted masses of volunteers from 
Australia and Canada. All the time they were training 
the great armies they have now put in the field. If 
they had acted upon the principles which you desire us 
now to apply, they would have refused to send any 
troops at all to France; they would have declined to 
receive the Canadian and Australian volunteers; they 
would have kept all their regulars at home to train the 
new levies ; and to any suggestion as to the "moral 
effect" of such conduct, they would have responded as 
you do when you say that a military policy should not 

319 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

deal with "sentimental values" and "sentimental con- 
siderations." If England had adopted such a course, it 
is conceivable that after eighteen months her army 
would have been better than, as a matter of fact, it 
actually was; but this would not have been of much 
consequence, because if she had so acted the war would 
have been already lost. 

Our task has been and is incomparably easier and 
safer than the tasks of the European powers in this 
war. Any one of them which behaved as we have be- 
haved would long before this time have been ruined. 
And we can still secure a measure of material well- 
being while shirking our duty. If we follow the ad- 
vice of the military men you quote we shall shirk our 
duty. I earnestly hope we refuse this advice, and play 
the part of men. I earnestly hope that we shall not 
advance our failure to provide universal obligatory 
military training in the past as an excuse for refusing 
to make use of the volunteer organizations that we can 
raise with reasonable rapidity in the present, while we 
are, with belated wisdom, introducing the principle of 
obligatory service. 

My dear Mr. Secretary, the proposal as you outline 
and adopt it, must come from doubtless well-meaning 
military men, of the red-tape and pipe-clay school, who 
are hide bound in the pedantry of that kind of wooden 
militarism which is only one degree worse than its 
extreme opposite, the folly which believes that an army 
can be improvised between sunrise and sunset. The 
two kinds of folly are nominally opposed, but really 
complementary to one another. It is unnecessary for 
me to say that military men differ among themselves in 
wisdom and far-sightedness, precisely as civilians do. ( 
The civilian heads of a government, when faced by a 

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great military crisis, have to show their own wisdom 
primarily in sifting out the very wise military advice 
from the very unwise military advice which they will 
receive. This is especially true in a service where pro- 
motion is chiefly by seniority and where a large number 
of the men who rise high owe more to the possession 
of a sound stomach than to the possession of the high- 
est qualities of head and heart. The military advice 
which you have received in this matter is strikingly 
unwise. I do not know whether those giving it openly 
advocated the principle of universal obligatory military 
training two and a half years ago — not within the last 
few months when people everywhere have been waking 
up to the matter — but two and a half years ago. If 
they did not, then they themselves are partly responsible 
for the condition of unpreparedness which renders it 
expedient from every standpoint that we should utilize 
every military asset in the country. 

The proposed bill of the Administration, in the last 
form shown me, was not to take any man over twenty- 
five. My proposal is to utilize the men who will not be 
brought in under your proposed conscription. If we 
had had a wise law for universal military training and 
service two and a half years ago, it certainly would have 
included some method for utilizing the men who would 
be of great value in war, but who are past the age 
limit when the first training would naturally be given. 
In the Spanish War I knew well the conditions of the 
training camps. I know that men put into service for 
a long period of training with no certainty that they 
are ever to be employed at the front, will feel far more 
disheartened than if they could be sent to the front 
within a reasonable time. I am certain that as rapidly 
as possible the various units should be transferred to 

321 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

France for intensive training; that as soon as possible 
an American force, under the American flag, should be 
established on the fighting line, should be steadily fed 
with new men to keep its members to the required 
point, and steadily reinforced by other units, so that it 
would be playing a continually more important part in 
the fighting. It is an ignoble thing for us not to put 
our men into the fighting line at the earliest possible 
moment. Such failure will excite derision and may 
have a very evil effect upon our national future. 

So much for the general consideration raised in your 
letter. Now, my dear sir, for what you specifically say 
about my offer. You say that the officers in command 
of any expedition must be chosen from the officers of 
the regular army, "who have devoted their lives ex- 
clusively to the study and pursuit of military matters,'* 
and have had "actual military experience," and that it 
would be improper to trust the "guidance and protec- 
tion" of the young men sent abroad in such a force, to 
men like myself. Doubtless the rule you thus indicate 
is generally wise. But to follow it without exercising 
any judgment as to exceptions would have barred the 
Confederate Army from using Forrest, and the Union 
Army from using Logan, and would have kept Wood 
and Funston out of the Spanish War. Most certainly 
I do not claim to be a Forrest, or a Logan. But I ask 
you to consider my actual experience. In the Spanish 
War I took part in raising a regiment, which I after- 
ward commanded. Exactly the same objections were 
made to the use of that regiment then that you now 
make to the use of the division (to be composed of 
just such regiments) which I ask leave to raise. One 
of the pacifist papers of that day, about a week prior 
to our going into action, gave expressi6n to this feeling 

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as follows — "competent observers have remarked that 
nothing more extraordinary has been done than the 
sending to Cuba of the first United States volunteer 
cavalry, known as the Rough Riders. Organized but 
four weeks, barely given their full complement of 
officers, and only a week of regular drill, these men 
have been sent to the front before they have learned 
the first elements of soldiery and discipline. There 
have been few cases of such military cruelty in our 
military annals." This was the prophecy. The fulfil- 
ment you will find in the reports of the expedition. 
In health, in achievement, and in the loss necessarily 
paid to purchase the achievement, the regiment stood 
with the best and most forward of the regular regi- 
ments with which it served. This efficiency was, of 
course, largely due to the way we set about raising it, 
and to the character of its first Colonel — Leonard 
Wood. He was at the time a surgeon in the U. S. 
Army. When President McKinley offered me the 
Colonelcy, I said I would take the Lieutenant-Colonelcy 
if he would make Wood Colonel. Since then Wood's 
record of achievement (for which he was conspicuously 
recognized by President McKinley — his promotion of 
a later date having been in the regular order) has been 
on a par with that of Lord Kitchener prior to the out- 
break of the present war ; Lord Cromer once said to me 
that Wood's administration of Cuba was the greatest 
feat of the kind that had been done in our time. 

At the close of the campaign, I was in command of 
the brigade, which consisted of my regiment, and of 
two regular regiments. Since then I have been com- 
mander-in-chief of the Army of the United States, and 
devoted much time and thought to the study of military 
and naval problems throughout the seven and a half 

323 



THEJFOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

years when I was President. I now ask permission to 
raise a division to consist of regiments like the regi- 
ment which I commanded in the Santiago campaign 
(and I can raise you an army corps on this basis). If 
I were young enough I should be willing to raise that 
division, and myself merely go as a second lieutenant 
in it. As it is, I believe I am best fitted to be the 
division commander in an expeditionary corps, under 
the chief of that corps; but if you desire to put me in 
a less position, and make me a brigade commander, I 
will at once raise the division, and can raise it without 
difficulty, if it is to be put under any man of the type 
of General Wood, General Pershing, or General Kuhn. 
These men served with loyalty and efficiency under me 
when I was President, and I believe that they will tell 
you, and that my former commanders, Lieutenant-Gen- 
eral Young, retired, and Major-General Sumner, re- 
tired, will tell you that I will serve with loyalty and 
efficiency and entire subordination under my superiors. 
Of course, my dear sir, I could not raise the division 
speedily and satisfactorily without the active and gen- 
erous support of yourself and of the Department. 

As for the young Americans who you feel should 
have better guidance and protection than I can give 
them, my dear Mr. Secretary, why not let them judge 
for themselves? The great majority of the men who 
were in my old regiment will eagerly come forward 
under me, in so far as they are yet fit. I believe I 
can appeal to the natural fighting men of this country. 
The plan you outline in your letter makes most of 
these men useless as a military asset to the United 
States at the very time when they could be most use- 
ful. Let me give you two examples. If you grant me 
permission, I would put at the head of most of my 

324 



CORRESPONDENCE 

regiments, captains or young majors in the regular 
army. One of my three civihan Colonels would prob- 
ably be Roger Williams of Kentucky, who is now a 
Major-General in the National Guard. The other two 
would be John Greenway of Arizona, and John Groome, 
the head of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary. I 
believe that only the very best men in the regular army 
would be better colonels than Greenway and Groome. 
They can be used to render to the United States, the 
splendid service they will render, if I am given the 
division for which I ask; otherwise, if the plan you 
outline is put in effect, they will be left unused at the 
very time when their services would be most valuable. 
As for the time necessary to train the division, I refer 
you to the time in which my regiment was utilized in 
the Spanish War. I have just received from one of 
the highest Canadian military authorities, a letter run- 
ning in part as follows: "I can personally say that 
with the Canadian system of intensive military training 
your announced plan to have Americans at the front in 
four months would be entirely practical." Under your 
orders, and by the aid of your Department, I am con- 
fident this could be done. If when I made my offer to 
you nearly three months ago, you had aided me in 
going ahead (the money I offered was as a gift, not a 
loan; the justification for the Government's permitting 
its use would have been precisely the same as the justi- 
fication for permitting the men — all volunteers by the 
way — recently summoned to the officers' training camp 
at Plattsburg to pay portions of their own expenses, or 
have their friends pay them, which your Department 
has directed), and if the Department had acted toward 
my division as General Wood acted toward the original 
Plattsburg camp (which started our whole Officers' 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

Reserve movement) that division would now be ready 
to sail for France for the intensive training. 

I desire that you judge me on my record. All I am 
asking is the chance to help make good the President's 
message of April 2d. If you don't know whether the 
governments of the allies would like me to raise such 
a division, and take it abroad at the earliest possible 
moment, I wish you would ask those governments your- 
self their feeling in the matter. I know that they 
earnestly desire us to send our men to the fighting line; 
and I have been informed from the highest sources 
that they would like to have me in the fighting line. 
Of course, they will not desire to have me go, or the 
division go, unless the Administration expresses its 
willingness. 

Let me repeat that if you permit me to raise a 
division, it will be composed of men who would not be 
reached in the bill you proposed to Congress, and who 
would otherwise not be utilized at all. I should, of 
course, like your authority to have about two regular 
officers for every thousand men, and perhaps four of 
the Reserve Officers for every thousand men, and per- 
haps certain additional ones if you saw fit to grant 
them. But the subtraction of these men from the 
number of men available to train the force called out 
under your proposed bill would be inconsiderable, com- 
pared to the immense gain which would come from 
having such a division put into the fighting line at the 
earliest moment. You already know the names of 
some of the regular officers for whom I would ask you. 
At the head of the medical corps I would ask for 
Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Page, U. S. A. You, of 
course, know the record of Colonel Page as surgeon 
and medical director. He has his arrangements made, 

326 



CORRESPONDENCE 

if he is allowed to go with me; and I believe that no 
division of any regular army would go with a better 
medical and surgical preparation than we should have 
under Colonel Page. In four months the men of the 
division would have been seasoned, under the thorough 
training which you rightly demand. Most of the men 
who would come forward would be seasoned already, 
exactly as was the case in my regiment nineteen years 
ago. Very many would have had military training and 
experience. I very earnestly hope you will be able to 
grant my request, sir. I make it not only because I 
most earnestly desire to serve the country under the 
President and under you, but because I am certain that 
in this way I can render the best service. 

Very respectfully, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Hon. Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War, 
Washington, D. C. 



War Department 

Washington, May 5, 191 7. 
My dear Mr. Roosevelt: 

I have read several times your long letter of April 
22d, and find myself much embarrassed in attempting 
more than mere acknowledgment of its receipt. For 
obvious reasons I cannot allow myself to be drawn into 
a discussion of your military experience and qualifica- 
tions. That is a subject upon which my personal 
opinion would be of little importance and upon which 
I am without the technical qualifications to form a 
judgment. Nor can I undertake a general defense of 

327 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

regular army officers and particularly of my associates 
in the General Staff against your suggestion that they 
may be possibly "of the red-tape and pipe-clay school." 
They are, after all, that part of our professional army 
of longest experience and by our law are my con- 
stituted military advisers. Incidentally, however, I can- 
not refrain from saying that I have found them men 
of intense and discerning enthusiasm for their pro- 
fession, filled with loyalty to their country, and very 
zealous so to train, equip and use our military forces 
as to make them most effective and to minimize to the 
utmost the inevitable losses of life which all uses of 
such forces necessarily entail. I am, of course, nol 
unaware that there are soldiers not now connected with 
the General Staff who have an absentee sense of super- 
iority about the conduct of business in which they are 
not personally participating; but all such differences of 
opinion must of necessity be resolved in favor of those 
who are charged with the responsibility for action, as, 
no doubt, your own experience as an executive has 
shown. 

The questions raised by your letter, however, seem 
to me to become simple when stripped of personal 
considerations. The war in Europe is confessedly 
stern, steady and relentless. It is a contest between 
the morale of two great contending forces. Any force 
sent by the United States into this contest should be 
so chosen as, first, to depress as far as may be the 
morale of the enemy ; second, to stimulate as far as may 
be the morale of our associates in arms; third, in itself 
to be as efficient from a military point of view as is 
possible, and fourth, so organized and led as to reduce 
its own losses and sacrifices to the minimum. 

As between a hastily summoned and unprofessional 

328 



CORRESPONDENCE , 

force on the one hand and a part of the regular pro- 
fessional army of the United States on the other, I 
am convinced that our adversary would esteem the 
former lightly; that our associates would be depressed 
by the dispatch of such a force, deeming it an evidence 
of our lack of seriousness about the nature of the en- 
terprise. Unless the whole theory of having a pro- 
fessional army is vicious, a portion of our professional 
army would be more efficient from a military point of 
view than such a hastily summoned force, and, quite 
obviously, the long and systematic training to which 
the members of our regular army are subjected will 
have taught them better how to fight without needless 
exposure and how to protect their health and diminish 
their losses both in camp and on the field. 

Thus, upon every consideration, my mind justifies 
the conclusion expressed to you in my letter of April 
13th. This reasoning quite frankly eliminates the con- 
sideration of personality; but upon that subject there 
is so much uncertainty of judgment that I do not feel 
that I could with confidence elect a course at plain 
variance with every other consideration in order to 
satisfy a personal conclusion based wholly upon a per- 
sonal consideration. 

Cordially yours, 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War. 
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 

432 Fourth Avenue, 
New York City, N. Y. 



329 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

Metropolitan 

432 Fourth Avenue, New York 

May 8, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Secretary: 

Many thanks for your letter of May 5th. 

You say that the questions raised by my letter are 
"simple when stripped of personal considerations." You 
then describe the war in Europe, and the objects to be 
achieved by the United States sending over a force to 
take part in the contest. I, of course, entirely agree 
with what you thus say as to the nature of the war, 
the need of our sending over an efficient force to de- 
press the morale of our enemy, and to raise that of 
our friends. 

Your next paragarph indicates that your present in- 
tention is to send over a portion of the "regular pro- 
fessional army of the United States" (rather than use 
a force, such as I suggest) ; and you state in the fol- 
lowing paragraph that in consequence your mind 
"justifies the conclusion" expressed in your letter of 
April 13th. But, my dear Mr. Secretary, this is the direct 
reverse of the conclusion of your letter of April 13th. In 
that letter you approved the recommendation of the 
general staff, that the regular army of the United 
States should not be sent over as an expeditionary 
force, but, on the contrary, should in its entirety 
kept here to train the selective draft army; and you 
dismissed, as of "sentimental" and "no military" value, 
the idea of sending over this force at once. In yoUr 
present letter you take the ground that such a force 
should be sent over, and give as two of the reasons 
that it would depress the morale of the enemy, and stimu- 

330 



CORRESPONDENCE 

late the morale of our associates in arms. I entirely 
agree with the position taken by you in this letter as 
to immediately sending an expeditionary force abroad, 
and as to the fact that it would, among other objects, 
achieve the two above, mentioned. But permit me, my 
dear Mr. Secretary, to say that this shows that you 
have reversed the action of the general staff, which you 
approved in your letter of April 13th, and surely the 
need of such reversal, as regards the most vital mili- 
tary matter which must immediately be decided, shows 
that my criticism of the men who gave you the advice 
was exactly justified. The matter of most immediate 
importance, which the staff had to decide at the time 
you wrote me on April 13th, was whether we should at 
once begin sending forces to the other side, or whether 
the entire regular army and everybody else fitted to do any 
soldiering should be kept on this side to train our army 
for a year or two, in order, as you phrased it in your 
letter, to use the army for decisive effect in the later 
stages of the war. The general staff adopted the latter 
view as you stated in your letter of April 13th. I pro- 
tested, with all possible emphasis, against this view. 
The French and the military authorities, with the ut- 
most emphasis, have since protested against it also, 
and have taken, in this matter, exactly the position 
which I took in my letter to you, and in my letters to 
Senator Chamberlain and Mr. Dent, and in my public 
utterances. From your letter, and from the statements 
in the press, I gather that the Administration has now 
reversed the position which was thus taken by the gen- 
eral staff, and, as regards sending abroad an expedi- 
tionary force, has come to the position I have so 
earnestly advocated, and which I set forth in detail in 
the letter that you have now answered. 

331 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

There remains the question of the composition of 
the force, and inasmuch, my dear Mr. Secretary, as in 
one of the vital matters the general staff misled you, 
and inasmuch as my advice has proved to be right, I 
beg you to at least consider the reasons I now advance 
for the advice I propose to give as regards another 
phase of the matter. 

There is every reason why a portion of the regular 
army should go abroad. There is also every reason 
why, in view of the smallness of the regular army and 
the need of its giving instruction, this proportion should 
not be too large. There is, therefore, every reason why 
the force should consist of a proportion of the regular 
army as a nucleus, with an efficient volunteer force 
under and with it. Under the act of March 2, 1899, 
volunteer regiments were raised which, in actual service 
in the Philippines, did almost as well as the regular regi- 
ments, especially when mixed with them. My own 
regiment in Cuba was raised under substantially similar 
legislation, and so I know, at first hand, of what I am 
speaking. Our own regular troops not having been 
trained in modern warfare, would themselves need 
some preliminary training in the theater of war before 
we could expect them to be as good as their French or 
English allies, or German foes. Volunteer regiments, 
chosen as above indicated, and used as hereinafter out- 
lined in close association with the regulars, could be 
made almost as good as the regulars during this period 
of training — and here again, my dear Mr. Secretary, 
remember that I am not making a mere guess, for I 
am stating what actually occurred in connection with 
my regiment at Santiago, and with the other United 
States volunteer regiments in the Philippines. 

I, therefore, respectfully, but earnestly suggest, that 

332 



CORRESPONDENCE 

I be allowed, under the direction of the War Depart- 
ment, to raise, or help raise, an army corps of two 
divisions. Inasmuch as we have no artillery fit to go 
into the battle front abroad, and inasmuch as it is at 
least doubtful whether artillery ought to be included 
permanently in the organization of an infantry division, 
I assume you would not wish this first expeditionary 
force to have artillery. Furthermore, I believe you will 
find that the wisest military men do not sympathize 
with the plan of having one divisional regiment of 
cavalry with each division. Cavalry should be able to 
act as a mass. I therefore very earnestly recommend 
that in connection with each division we raise a three- 
regiment brigade of cavalry. As long as the fighting 
is in the trenches, this cavalry will be used dismounted, 
and will represent an addition to the infantry strength 
of equal value. (As soon as we began to fight outside 
the trenches, the two brigades could be joined together, 
and could be used as a small cavalry division, under the 
direction of the corps commander.) 

Each of the divisions sent over would thus consist, 
in addition to the supply, transportation, and other 
services, of three three-regiment infantry brigades, one 
three-regiment cavalry brigade, a regiment of engineers, 
and a regiment of machine guns. (I will give you the 
details of the organization, if you so desire, and send 
you also a carefully wrought out blue print of the en- 
tire organization of the division.) For a corps of two 
divisions, therefore, there would be six infantry bri- 
gades, two cavalry brigades, two machine gun regiments, 
and two engineers' regiments, or twenty-eight regiments 
in all. There should be one regular regiment in every 
cavalry or infantry brigade; eight regular regiments in 
all, This WQuld leave twenty volunteer regiments. As 

333 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

regards four of these, I would suggest civilian colonels, 
two of them being of the National Guard; namely. 
Brigadier General Roger Williams of Kentucky, and 
Colonel Forman of Illinois, together with Colonel John 
Groome of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, and 
John C. Greenway of Arizona. For the other sixteen 
colonels, together with the corps and divisional chiefs 
of staff and the like, I would suggest to you captains 
and junior majors from the regular army, including 
such men as those I have mentioned — Frank McCoy, 
Fitz Hugh Lee, Edgar Collins, Phil Sheridan, Moseley, 
Gordon Johnston, Jim Shelley, Hugh D. Wise, the two 
Parker brothers (one cavalry, one infantry), Smedberg, 
Goethals, Quekenmeyer, Quackenbush, Baer, Fitch, Lin- 
coln Andrews, and others. For brigade commanders I 
would suggest to you to appoint men like Lieutenant- 
Colonel Allen, Colonel Howze, and Major Harbord. 
Rear Admiral Winslow, retired, would make an ad- 
mirable brigade commander. The corps and division 
commanders would be, I presume, men already with 
the rank of general, whom you chose; any men of the 
stamp of those mentioned in my previous letter would 
do admirably. I would be glad to accept the junior 
brigade generalship, ranking behind the other seven 
brigade commanders, as well, of course, as the division 
and corps commanders. This would be merely giving 
me the position which I held at the close of the San- 
tiago campaign when, because of my conduct in the 
field, I was recommended by my superior officers, not 
only for promotion, but for the medal of honor and 
for brevets. 

In addition, I should trust that you would allow cer- 
tain junior officers, men like Lieutenant Stonewall Jack- 
son Christian, Lieutenant Wainwright, Lieutenant 

334 



CORRESPONDENCE 

Chaffee, and others of Hke position, to come in as 
majors or adjutants, or with similar rank. If possible, 
I should like to use, in each volunteer regiment, two 
or three regulars, and six or eight, or ten reserve 
officers from the Plattsburg and similar camps, together 
with half a dozen of the best regular non-commissioned 
officers, giving these the rank of second lieutenant. 
This would not represent an appreciable drawing off 
of strength from the body of men you wish to use in 
training the draft army, for you have about 35,000 men 
in the training camps, and this proposal of mine would 
only be to take out, all told, from the officers and non- 
commissioned officers of the regular army, and from the 
reserve officers, between 200 and 300 men, who would 
be employed in training some 40,000 volunteers. These 
volunteers would be men of exceptional quality, enlisted 
for the war, with the special purpose of being imme- 
diately sent to the fighting line in Europe. 

Under this plan you would immensely increase the 
size of the army you sent abroad, and, owing to the 
nature of the volunteer regiments, four-fifths of whom 
would be under regular officers, and all of them 
brigaded with regulars, the force would be almost or 
practically as good as if composed solely of regulars ; 
and yet you would not be sending abroad a wholly dis- 
proportioned amount of our small regular army, and 
would be enabled to use the others for the purposes of 
instruction at home. The two divisions at the front 
would be kept filled, all the losses being made good by 
recruits, and as rapidly as possible other divisions would 
be put beside them. In each case, as soon, or almost 
as soon, as raised, the brigades and divisions would 
be sent across to, or just behind, the theater of war in 
France, or if this was impossible, at least to England, 

335 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

and there trained in bayonet work, bombing, gassing, 
and all the other incidents of modern trench warfare. 

I have the highest respect for the individual officers 
and men of the National Guard, the greatest admiration 
for the patriotism of those who served on the border 
last year, and a thorough belief in the efficiency of the 
National Guard for its proper duty, which is purely 
state duty. But, of course, divided control between 
state and nation is thoroughly vicious. Moreover, many 
of the men in the National Guard are family men, sup- 
porting their families by their wages, and it is a cruel 
injustice to these men to take them to the front when 
there are literally millions of other men who ought to 
go first. Again, there are plenty of men in the National 
Guard who can do state work well, but who are not fit 
for a gruelling campaign. Therefore, the National 
Guard regiment should not be sent out as such, if there 
is a desire either to do equal justice to the men or to 
secure efficient results. Each regiment should furnish a 
nucleus — which might be a quarter, or which might be a 
half of its strength, and which would be composed both 
of officers and enlisted men, and should, in most cases, 
be put under the command of a regular officer; then, 
around this nucleus as a framework, could be built up a 
purely National United States regiment, either by volun- 
teering or by the draft. Such a regiment would be fit 
for duty very quickly, and would render admirable serv- 
ice; while at the same time these guardsmen who ought 
not to be asked to undertake a foreign campaign would 
be left within the state, to do the necessary and import- 
ant state duty which the National Guard is peculiarly 
fitted to perform. 

The selective draft has been authorized by Congress. 
The Harding amendment, or similar measures, will en- 



CORRESPONDENCE 

able the Government to admirably use men who desire 
to serve, whose ardor it is certainly unwise to damp, 
who could render invaluable service, and who otherwise 
would be unused. If this amendment is adopted, and the 
Department authorizes me to raise a force as above out- 
lined, I can at once assign the regular officers whom the 
Department desires as colonels to different localities, 
where they can raise regiments or battalions, already 
provisionally provided. We can get private help pre- 
cisely as in connection with the training camps. While, 
of course, we cannot act as instantaneously as if we had 
begun these steps a couple of months ago, yet we can act 
with great speed, and in a way tO' establish the best pos- 
sible precedent, while at the same time we are putting a 
substantial force of good fighting men on the firing line 
at the earliest possible moment. 

I am, sir, with great respect, 

Very sincerely, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Hon. Newton D. Baker, 

Secretary of War, 
Washington, D. C. 

War Department 

May II, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Roosevelt: 

I beg leave to acknowledge the receipt of your letter 
of May 8th. 

It does not seem to me that the considerations urged 
affect in any degree the soundness of the conclusions 
stated in my letter of May 5th, and I suppose that, since 
the responsibility for action and decision in this matter 
rests upon me, you shall have to regard the determina- 
tion I have already indicated as final, unless changing 
circumstances require a re-study of the whole question, 

337 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

I appreciate your willingness so thoroughly to discuss 
this important subject, and have read with interest your 
suggestions for organization and action. It is, of course, 
unpleasant to find myself at variance with you in a mat- 
ter of opinion of this sort, but the earnestness with which 
you have pressed your views is a comforting assurance 
of the zeal with which you will cooperate in carrying for- 
ward unitedly, whole-heartedly and effectively the opera- 
tions determined upon, now that this particular phase 
of the question is finally disposed of. 

Newton D. Baker, 
Secretary of War. 
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 

432 Fourth Avenue, 
New York. 

Telegram 
To the President: May 18, 19 17. 

White House, 

Washington, D. C. 

I respectfully ask permission immediately to raise two 
divisions for immediate service at the front under the 
bill which has just become law, and hold myself ready 
to raise four divisions, if you so direct. I respectfully 
refer for details to my last letters to the Secretary of 
War. If granted permission, I earnestly ask that Cap- 
tain Frank McCoy be directed to report to me at once. 
Minister Fletcher has written me that he is willing. 
Also if permission to raise the divisions is granted, I 
would like to come tO' Washington as soon as the War 
Department is willing, so that I may find what supplies 
are available, and at once direct the regular officers who 
are chosen for brigade and regimental commands how 
and where to get to work. 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

338 



CORRESPONDENCE 



Telegram 



The White House^ 
Washington, D. C, May 19, 191 7. 
I very much regret that I cannot comply with the re- 
quest in your telegram of yesterday. The reasons I 
have stated in a public statement made this morning, and 
I need not assure you that my conclusions were based 
entirely upon imperative considerations of public policy 
and not upon personal or private choice. 

WooDROw Wilson. 

Letter sent to each of various men who had done work in per- 
sonally raising units for the proposed divisions which were finally 
authorized by Congress : 

May 25, 1917. 
My dear Sir: 

You have doubtless seen the President's announcement 
wherein he refused to make use of the Volunteer Forces 
which Congress had authorized him to permit me to raise. 

Prior to this announcement by the President, I had sent 
him a telegram as follows: 

[Here I included the two telegrams quoted immediately 
above.] 

Accordingly, I communicated with as many of the men 
who had agreed to raise units for service in this division 
as possible, and after consultation with about twenty of 
them I issued the statement which is herewith appended. 

I now release you and all your men. I wish to express 
my deep sense of obligation to you and to all those who 
had volunteered under and in connection with this 
division. 

As you doubtless know, I am very proud of the Rough 
Riders, the First Volunteer Cavalry, with whom I served 
in the Spanish-American War. I believe it is a just and 

339 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

truthful statement of the facts when I say that this regi- 
ment did as well as any of the admirable regular regi- 
ments with which it served in the Santiago campaign. It 
was raised, armed, equipped, drilled, mounted, dis- 
mounted, kept two weeks aboard transports and put 
through two victorious aggressive fights in which it lost 
one-third of the officers and one-fifth of the men; all 
within sixty days from the time I received my com- 
mission. 

If the President had permitted me to raise the four 
divisions, I am certain that they would have equalled the 
record, only on a hundredfold larger scale. They would 
have all been on the firing line before or shortly after 
the draft army had begun to assemble, and moreover 
they could have been indefinitely reinforced, so that they 
would have grown continually stronger and more efficient. 

I regret from the standpoint of the country that your 
services were not utilized. But the country has every 
reason to be proud of the zeal, patriotism and business- 
like efficiency with which you came forward. 

With all good wishes, 

Faithfully yours, 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

May 21, 1917. 
To the men who have volunteered for immediate service 

on the firing line in the divisions which Congress 

authorised: 
The President has announced that he will decline to 
permit those divisions to be organized or to permit me 
to have a command in connection with such a force. 
After consultation yesterday, personally or by wire, 
with some of the men who have volunteered to raise 
units — regiments and battalions — for the divisions, in- 

340 



CORRESPONDENCE 

eluding John C. Groome, of Pennsylvania ; Seth Bullock, 
of South Dakota; John C. Greenway, of Arizona; John 
M. Parker, of Louisiana; Robert Carey, of Wyoming; 
J. P. Donnelly, of Nevada; Sloan Simpson, of Texas; 
D. C Collier and F. R. Burnham, of California; I. L. 
Reeves, Frazer Metzger, and H. Nelson Jackson, of 
Vermont ; Harry Stimson, W. J. Schieffelin, and William 
H. Donovan, of New York, and Messrs. James R. Gar- 
field, Raymond Robbins, R. H. Channing, David M. 
Goodrich, W. E. Dame, George Roosevelt, Richard 
Derby and various others who were immediately acces- 
sible, it was decided unanimously that in view of the 
decision of the President the only course open to us is 
forthwith to disband and to abandon all further effort in 
connection with the divisions, thereby leaving each man 
free to get into the military service in some other way, 
if that is possible, and, if not, then to serve his country 
in civil life as he best can. 

As good American citizens we loyally obey the decision 
of the Commander-in-Chief of the American Army and 
Navy. The men who have volunteered will now consider 
themselves absolved from all further connection with this 
movement. The funds that have been promised will be 
treated as withdrawn and applied to other purposes. I 
therefore direct that this statement be sent to the leaders 
in the various states who have been raising troops and 
that it be published. 

Our sole aim is to help in every way in the successful 
prosecution of the war and we most heartily feel that 
no individual's personal interest should for one moment 
be considered save as it serves the general public interest. 
We rejoice that a division composed of our fine regular 
soldiers and marines under so gallant and efficient a 
leader as General Pershing is to be sent abroad. We 

341 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

have a right to a certain satisfaction in connection 
therewith. 

The Brooklyn Eagle last evening stated authoritatively 
that ''the sending of this expedition was a compromise 
between the original plans of the General Staff, which 
favored no early expedition, and the request of Colonel 
Roosevelt for authority for an immediate expedition. 
The Roosevelt agitation, backed by the express desire 
of such distinguished military leaders as General Joffre 
and General Retain, unquestionably had its effect in bring- 
ing about the Pershing expedition. The compromise is 
that France gets American soldiers in the trenches, but 
Roosevelt will not lead or accompany them. It is be- 
lieved in Washington that any criticism for turning down 
Roosevelt will be fully answered by the fact that Ameri- 
can soldiers are going over." 

If this gives the explanation of the matter, I gladly say 
that we are all unselfishly pleased to have served this 
use, although naturally we regret not to have been al- 
lowed ourselves to render active service. 

It is due to the men who have come forward in this 
matter during the three and a half months since February 
2d, when I began the work of raising one or more divi- 
sions, that the following facts should be known: 

If yesterday my offer immediately to raise four divi- 
sions for immediate use at the front had been accepted 
the various units of the first division would to-morrow 
have begun to assemble at whatever points the War De- 
partment had indicated, and they would have assembled 
in full force and without an hour's delay as rapidly as 
the War Department directed them where to go and as | 
soon as it provided them camping places, tents, blan- 
kets, etc. 

We were prepared by the use of private funds partly 

342 



CORRESPONDENCE 

to make good any immediate lack in such supplies as re- 
gards many of the units. Fifteen days afterward the 
second division would have mobilized in a similar 
fashion, and then, at intervals of thirty days, the two 
other divisions. 

In accordance with what I had found to be the wish 
of the military authorities among our allies, each of the 
divisions would have been ready to sail for France for 
intensive training at the theater of war within thirty days 
of the time it began to mobilize, if the War Department 
were able to furnish supplies ; and we would have asked 
permission to use the rifles and ammunition now in use in 
the French and British armies. 

All four divisions would have sailed and two would 
have been on the firing line by September ist, the time 
at which the Secretary of War has announced that the 
assembling of the selective draft army is to begin. About' 
one-half of our men, at least of those in the first division, 
were men who had already seen military service. 

I wish respectfully to point out certain errors into 
which the President has been led in his announcement. 
He states that the purpose was to give me an "independ- 
ent" command. In my last letter to the Secretary of 
War I respectfully stated that if I were given permission 
to raise an army corps of two divisions, to be put under 
the command of some General like Wood or Bell or 
Pershing or Barry or Kuhn, I desired for myself only the 
position of junior among the eight brigade commanders. 
My position would have been exactly the same as theirs, 
except that I would have ranked after and have been 
subordinate to the rest of them. 

The President alludes to our proffered action as one 
that would have an effect "politically," but as not con- 
tributing to the "success of the war," and as represent- 

343 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

ing a "policy of personal gratification or advantage." I 
wish respectfully but emphatically to deny that any 
political consideration whatever or any desire for per- 
sonal gratification or advantage entered into our calcu- 
lations. Our undivided purpose was to contribute effec- 
tively to the success of the war. 

I know nothing whatever of the politics of the im- 
mense majority of the men who came forward, and those 
whose politics I do know numbered as many Democrats as 
Republicans. My purpose was to enable the Government 
to use as an invaluable military asset the men who would 
not be reached under the selective draft, who were fit 
for immediate service, and the great majority of whom 
would not otherwise be used at all. 

As above pointed out, all four divisions, if the War 
Department could equip them, would have been sent to 
the aid of our hard-pressed allies before the training of 
the selective draft army was even begun, and they would 
not have been put into the firing line until the French and 
British military authorities deemed them fit. 

The President says in effect that to comply with our 
offer would have been mischievous from the military 
standpoint and he adds that the regular officers whom 
I have asked to have associated with me are "some of 
the most effective officers of the regular army," who 
"cannot possibly be spared from the duty of training 
regular troops." One of the chief qualifications for mili- 
tary command is to choose for one's associates and 
subordinates "the most effective officers," and this qualifi- 
cation the President thus states that I possess. 

As for my withdrawing them from the "more pressing 
and necessary duty of training" the troops, I wish to 
point out that I had asked for about fifty regular officers 
from lieutenant-colonels to second lieutenants for the 

344 



CORRESPONDENCE 

first division. This would be only about one-tenth of the 
number who will go with General Pershing's division 
which, the President announces, is to be composed exclu- 
sively of regulars. Therefore, the present plan will take 
from "most pressing and necessary duty" about ten times 
as many regular officers as would have been taken under 
our proposal. 

It has been stated that the regular officers are opposed 
to our plan. As a matter of fact "the most effective" 
fighting officers have been eager to be connected with or 
to have under them the troops we proposed to raise. 

The President condemns our proposal on the ground 
that "undramatic" action is needed, action that is "prac- 
tical and of scientific definiteness and precision." There 
was nothing dramatic in our proposal save as all propo- 
sals indicting eagerness or willingness to sacrifice life for 
an ideal are dramatic. It is true that our division would 
have contained the sons or grandsons of men who in the 
Civil War wore the blue or the gray; for instance, the 
sons or grandsons of Phil Sheridan, Fitz Hugh Lee, 
Stonewall Jackson, James A. Garfield, Simon Bolivar 
Buckner, Adna R. Chaffee, Nathan Bedford Forest; but 
these men would have served either with commissions or 
in the ranks, precisely like the rest of us; and all alike 
would have been judged solely by the efficiency — includ- 
ing the "scientific definiteness" — with which they did 
their work and served the flag of their loyal devotion. 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

In view of the President's reference to the "political" 
effect and "personal gratification or advantage" involved 
in the offer to raise the divisions in question it is but just 
to point out the following facts : 

My offer was first made long before the German note 

345 



THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD 

of January 31st last. I repeated it immediately 
after that date, on the morning of February 2d. If 
the offer had been accepted at that time a division would 
have been ready to sail for France in April, the moment 
that Congress declared that war existed. We received, 
all told, applications from over 300,000 men for the divi- 
sions. From our rough preliminary examinations we 
were able to guarantee that we could from these have 
raised over 200,000 — double the number that the four 
divisions would have contained. 

On February 9th the President's Secretary of War 
stated, as a reason for refusing my offer, that Congress 
must provide "under its own conditions" for raising 
troops. When Congress did thus provide, the President 
refused to act under the conditions provided. 

The President's suggestion that I had asked for an 
"independent" command was in flat contradiction of the 
facts ; which were all before him when he made the state- 
ment. I had repeatedly and explicitly asked to be put 
under the command of whatever commander was chosen 
for the expedition. 

On April 13th Mr. Baker wrote that there was to 
be no expedition sent to the front until the armies were 
trained [which would be some time in 1918]. Before May 
8th, the pressure initiated by my offer caused him, or 
his chief, to reverse this decision, and therefore to save 
this nation the humiliation of taking no military part in 
the war throughout 1917 and part of 1918. 

The refusal of the President to accept my offer was 
supported and applauded by the leaders among the 
zealous and intelligent partisans of Germany and oppo- 
nents of war with Germany in this country, including 
senators such as Messrs. LaFollette and Stone, and 
papers like Mr. Hearst's, and the German-American 
press generally. 

346 



CORRESPONDENCE 

Mr. Wilson's Secretary of War in April advanced as a 
reason for refusing my application, that commanding offi- 
cers ought to be "selected because of their previous mili- 
tary training, and, as far as possible, actual military expe- 
rience." In August, four months later, Mr. Wilson nomi- 
nated for the position of Brigadier-General, a gentleman 
from New York, whose "military training and ex- 
perience" apparently consisted in having been a Captain 
in the militia, a major in a volunteer regiment which did 
not leave the country, and Adjutant-General under Gov- 
ernor Sulzer. The Senate requested from the Adminis- 
tration information as to the nominee's military record. 
The nomination was then withdrawn, on the ground of 
temporary physical incapacity. A number of the nomina- 
tions which were not withdrawn were seemingly of sub- 
stantially similar character. 

President Wilson's reasons for refusing my offer had 
nothing to do either with military considerations or with 
the public needs. 



347 



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